My Wandering Days

This Blog Has Moved (AGAIN!)

2009-11-21T23:27:00.001Z

Find me here from now on. That's www.aliteralgirl.com. I've got my own domain name and everything! Cool, huh?

THIS BLOG HAS OFFICIALLY MOVED...

2009-04-07T16:39:00.004+01:00

It's a little scary for me to say this (I feel as if I'm literally uprooting myself), but this blog, the one you're reading now, has officially MOVED to aliteralgirl.wordpress.com. It now lives here, and nothing but the web address (and, ok, the design) has changed, so please please visit me here from now on. Update your bookmarks, your newsfeeds, your brains. I'll even remind you again of the NEW ADDRESS! It's: aliteralgirl.wordpress.com.

Thanks for bearing with me, and for reading my blog; from now on, I'll see you here...

Photosynthesis

2009-04-07T12:56:00.003+01:00

The city this morning was heartbreakingly beautiful. Puffy clouds and air so fresh you could drink it (I seem to have a thing about this). I detoured, went gliding down Broad Street and curled up St. Giles so that I could buy a sandwich and a pastry from a cheerful woman. Traffic, thick traffic, all the way towards town, but the roads away from town were clear and the city in spite of the traffic still had that air of Easter emptiness. I saw a girl in a striped shirt-dress and boots pedalling towards the Bodleian, her basket laden with bags and books, and thought how lovely it would be to have woken up early just to work in a library, to come out into the sun at intervals like a young stalk needing to photosynthesize, to maybe have tea later at the Vaults & Gardens cafe, outside in the graveyard where the chairs overlook tombs and flowers and the yellow-bodied dome of the Radcliffe Camera.

Hurst Street, Springtime, 6 am

2009-04-05T13:26:00.006+01:00

I wake at the unfamiliar hour to animal sounds. Noises like foxes fighting; exotic screeches carried down the street by wind or proximity. You are asleep until I stick my head out of the window, peering left and right past the dawn-bathed terraced houses.
"That sound," I say.
"Cats?" you say. Fall asleep again. I go into the bathroom, where the window overlooks a single street lamp. As I am watching it, through the blinds, observing the sallow glow against the almost-bright morning sky, it goes out. Apart from the emptiness it might be mid-morning.

Back in bed, the fox-sounds have stopped. Now it's only birds. Doves? In that way that early-morning birds have of making repetitive songs with their hoots and growls, they are like the worst pop song on the radio. Over and over again in my head (I'll forget the tune by afternoon). You are still asleep, and I ponder getting up, going outside, to see the street before anyone else sees it. Sunday mornings are best for this; no early commuters whistling past on bicycles, smugly more productive. All the drunks have gone to bed. For the first time in a long time I perceive how ugly all the cars are, lined up nose-to-tail, cows going to slaughter, in various shades of modern, various kinds of disrepair. There was one last year with a smashed-in window, that sat on the corner of Leopold Street and Hurst, and for months if you wanted to walk past it you had to pick your way through broken green glass. The houses still look bare--even the ones with gardens out front are still suffering the effects of winter gloom.

The thing about this street is, it wears its shabbiness well. Last night as we rounded the corner I said to you how I fond I was of the place where our street meets Magdalen road--of the pub with her bicycle rack, her evening-yellow windows, the red-and-green facades of the bookshop and the café, the weary half-rendered lettering of Silvesters ("E TERS STORES"), with its pots, its herbs, its kitchenware.

Not a soul about this morning, and as I try to fall asleep my mind is suddenly full of a Boston autumn, the crispness of the Charles River and the smell of rich people's houses in the Back Bay. Couldn't be further from where we are now. I close my eyes to picture the promenade in October better, the strange dome of the half-shell in afternoon light, the runners, the girls in skirts and light coats, stretching the days of sensible dressing out as long as possible. I think for certain I won't fall asleep but I do, with you and the pop-songs of the morning birds and the empty river of street that runs between James and Magdalen.

Cowley Road, 4:30 pm

2009-04-03T16:21:00.005+01:00

Sometimes Simon & Garfunkel is the only suitable soundtrack. Even when the sky isn't cloudy. Today it's a wide sheet of azure that the Mediterranean would be jealous of. I like the way the building across the street, made of blackened red brick, slants, moves away from the Cowley Road at a precise angle. The graffiti scrawled in white, below the beetroot window frames: Total Texaco Fuel Oppression in Burma. A poetic structure, as I sit here listening to the hum of ice-cream eaters, smelling burnt toast. Watching balding man in an army-green coat, brown leather brogues, smoking. Joined now by a woman with black hair and black boots. She's taller than him, but they're both made in miniature, fragile, transient beside the brick. Three girls, one in pink, one in blue, one in green, passing by. The delivery bicycle with its vast basket, shiny silver bell (I'm reflected in the domed steel). The shadow of this building is slinking up the side of the one across the road. Stealthy springtime: before you know it the sky will darken and the evening will dawn, the drunks will come out to play, the chill will slide back into the air and the dark hairs of you thin arms will stand on end, soldiers at attention, reminding you of a photograph taken at that September party, when you wore the jacket of his uniform over your sleeveless dress and leaned against somebody's garden wall.

And We Don't Even Own This House

2009-04-02T23:43:00.006+01:00

On days like these, I'm reminded of the ranch. We have a dead something festering in the walls or under the floorboards somewhere; all we know is that the smell is strongest at the spot just before you enter the kitchen. The Man comes home from football wanting to take a shower; but a pipe has burst, or broken, or done whatever it is pipes do, so that the kitchen is flooded with a sudden stream of water before we turn the main off. By sticking our heads in the cupboard under the sink (him in football kit, me in an oversized and ripped man's shirt and a pair of silk pajama shorts because I thought, silly me, I might have an early night) we ascertain which particular bit of pipe is the problem ("You see the silvery one?" he says. "No, not that silvery one, that silvery one."). But what good is knowing this? I have the imprint of a wet review section of the Guardian from six months ago on my feet and the Man can feel some "fraying," but neither of us is taking a bath tonight, I can guarantee that. As we carpet the kitchen in newspaper we talk about the smell, which the Man is convinced is like galvanized rubber. "It's dead rodent," I assure him. "I got very used to that smell in my childhood." Which makes my childhood sound horrific; it wasn't, quite the opposite, just infused, every so often, with eau de decomposing rat. Or eau de galvanized rubber, if you prefer.

A Country Evening

2009-04-01T19:00:00.003+01:00

Just as we finish scrambling along the wet shores of a makeshift lake, my phone rings. We're behind a perfectly English stone wall, sheltered from the muddy road running away from the village. Just a 9-year-old boy and myself. We've been exploring the outskirts of the village, the secret swampy places between water and meadow, for nearly an hour. At one point, after I sink in the mud, I tell my companion about the time my Dad and I donned wellies and walked the length of our local creek, following it until it met the sea. Now he's calling me, my Dad. From Buellton, the truck-stop town of grocery stores and auto-repair shops. I can't see civilization from here (maybe the gleam of a thatched roof beyond the wall) but I can talk to California. I'm watching the 9-year-old leaping over a stream in the same way I used to do while I waited for my Dad to finish his work in the garage. I'm speaking to that same Dad while I watch the 9-year-old. There's something strangely circular about this, and something dizzyingly meta. And, more simply, something rather delightful.

(Also, re: the last post, this, from Alain de Botton: "Journeys are the midwives of thought.")

Thought in Motion

2009-03-30T19:29:00.005+01:00

I'm starting to think that I'm like one of those kinetic powered watches. Fueled by movement. When I was very small, my favorite thing to do at home was to think. For many people, thinking may be an active process only in the mind, but for me, it was (and, I'm increasingly aware, still is) a physically active process as well. At eight I traced a path around a pile of rocks outside my Grandparents' house. It was a small circuit and it might have made anyone dizzy, but maybe that was the point: in my dizziness I created stories for hours. Sometimes I bounced a ball against the side of the house--one of those red rubber balls, the ones we played four-square with in the playground at school. I was a good four-square player and bouncing the ball against the wall gave me practice as well as time to crawl inside my own self. I climbed the rocks behind the house, too. Some people might have said I was a little feral, even. I sniffed my books and sometimes, when I was out walking in circles around the pile of rocks, I took a bookmark with me to simulate the feel of words, which were so tied already to the act of reading.

Later I took longer walks in the hills. Being stationary made my mind cave in, my thoughts turn idle, as if my brain was made of syrup. I made stories up in my head and if I was feeling particularly excited about one I had to go out, I couldn't sit still, not even in a rainstorm. If I sat still the thoughts festered, but if I walked, they came easy and in great numbers. I think my breath was tied to my ideas somehow.

It became less literal over the years, as, it seems, many things do. When we're children, things manifest in concrete ways, but by the time we've reached adulthood we've found ways to complicate even something as simple as the process of thought, so that metaphor is all we have left to describe ourselves. Now what happens is that journey--going somewhere, travel--stimulates thought. Not even necessarily about the place itself, but, as with the watch, the movement of self sets something else in motion.

I'm a travel writer, in the way that travel can be taken to mean the trip from one end of the garden path to the other.

Like Being a Kid Again

2009-03-28T00:08:00.002Z

We made a few sausages today. We're making more tomorrow. All I'll say for now is, PIG INTESTINES FEEL SO WEIRD. I stood there unraveling them (they're puzzles), rinsing their insides with water so that we could fill them with minced pork, and all I could think was, this is way, way better than play-dough.

Fés, Summer, 2007 (A Poem in Prose)

2009-03-27T00:20:00.006Z

Fés, Summer, 2007

From the bruised-sky countenance of an English summer (three hot days and a thunderstorm) we fly south; we are young.

At Bab Boujaloud, the blue-green gate, we look up, eyes hot, sweating diamonds onto a street paved with dust. Hey, Bob Dylan! Ali Baba! Nice girl! (I like being your nice girl, while you, today, are all shaggy brown hair, beard, sunglasses).

I like it when you speak French, when you say shokran, when you sit for hours, beneath a lamp, sketching its lace form, each precise indent, measuring with your eyes. You are intimate with it; I want to ask how these things are done, but the silence is all that keeps us cool.

Kif? We watch the owner of the café, carefully rolling, with stained and heavy hands, a joint. Kif? He says. Then I lose track; we swim home through Fauvist paint (even you look made of blue and green now). We follow sex with a nap, wake with eyes ringed red to dancing music. Listen to that, you say. (Perfect bliss).

In sudden palaces, children play, women scrub the smell of decay, the rot of orange blossoms from the floor. The tiles arranged with surgical symmetry (mathematics by color). We spend our days walking imperfect circles around the riads, the minarets, the medersas. We spend our nights too hot to touch.

Mornings made of honey and a single cube of sugar dissolved in the ocean of your coffee. I prefer mint, hot, sweet, so you teach me to tie a paper napkin round the glass because it was something you learned, once. I read the guidebook to you: It seems to exist suspended in time.

Even the shadows are still.

The Circus at Night

2009-03-26T22:28:00.004Z

Through an open window I can see that the circus has come to town, planted itself on the top of a grassy knoll, where I stood a week ago in awe of the city spires, drenched in dusk-light. Walking past it now, in the chill of early spring, I don't see the city spires, but hear the music. Whimsical; accordions and whistles. The big-domed tents and the splashes of red-and-yellow and the grass, eerily bright at this time of night. The twinkle of lights. I can't see any people; are they inside the tents? Are they ghosts? How has this series of structures, this thing which is to me more an idea than a reality, come to be so suddenly on this grassy knoll? I hear the familiar squeak of my bicycle wheels; I fail to understand the apparition.

And what, anyway, do I actually know about circuses? Nothing really. Once I read a book in which a girl and her brother, wounded in combat, limping, dour, soured by years in the trenches, visit the circus. Once I knew a girl who objected to circuses because of the animals. She didn't say why and I didn't ask. Once my parents went to see the Circ du Soleil, the circus in the sun, the circus made of human bodies, with some friends. They're things I know only from the outside, circuses.

Coming down the hill that I cycled up hours earlier, my fingers turn to ten fat icicles, it feels. I no longer know when I'm squeezing my brakes. I arrive home and it hurts just to turn the lock in the door. The city is indecisive; is she playful, or cold and somber? Is she warm or is she still rapt in the throes of winter? Does she--and do we, by extension--miss her students, in this time of their absence, or is she reveling without them, a feather set free upon an April wind?

Impossible to tell, tonight.

Bruises and Bills and Boot-Heels, Oh My

2009-03-26T21:28:00.004Z

This week has probably not been one of the finest of my entire existence. I promise this won't be one of those whiny "everything's gone to shit" posts, but I fell down the stairs at work yesterday. FELL DOWN THE STAIRS. Just saying.

I was reading the paper. I should have known not to do this, as once, when I was about six, I was reading a book whilst walking down the street with my Dad, when all the sudden a parking meter sprung from the earth and hit me in the face and I fell down, but it's not an excuse anyway. I tripped over my own feet with about three stairs to go, and stopped my fall by hitting my head on the wall in front of me. I was so surprised by this that I couldn't decide if I should cry or laugh or what, so I just gathered myself up and pressed a palm to the painful part of my head. After a little while it occurred to me that I was just standing on the landing with one hand clapped to my head, looking loony, and that maybe I should move, so I took my hand away from the bump and saw blood. Well, head wounds do that, I thought calmly, and I went upstairs to the staff toilet and splashed water on my face.

All well and good, but by the time I had got back down to the office again, it was bleeding again. I should mention that it wasn't bleeding profusely, not by any means. More just...seeping. So when a co-worker asked idly if I'd hit my head, I said, yeah, I fell down the stairs, and giggled, and she said Oh my gosh, you mean right now? Because your head is bleeding.

Well, that was it. I could no longer pretend that my clumsiness was casual. Instead, I had to go across the road and get ice from the kitchen. Only they had no ice, so the chef brought me a plastic bag full of frozen corn. My boss wanted to bandage it to my head so that my arm wouldn't get sore holding it there, but I drew the line at being an English patient lookalike. After a half hour of idleness I put a plaster over the cut and threw myself (metaphorically, not literally) back at my work.

I felt fine, and I wasn't prepared to linger for long on the incident, especially not as it highlighted an example of stupendous ineptitude. But after ten thousand questions, expressions of sympathy, Natasha Richardson comparisons, and suggestions that I drink a little less at work (I don't drink at all at work, in case you're tempted to take that literally), I began to fret. It doesn't take much to make me fret (I suffer, after all, from varying degrees of generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and hypochondria, which is a common but very unfortunate combination of ailments), and the internet, let me tell you, is the jackpot of fret-fuel.

So if you ever wanted to know what could possibly happen to you if you hit your head, causing your brain to strike your skull and begin bleeding, look it up online and then PANIC. By the time I got home to the Man, I was a proper wreck. "I don't want to die because I fell down the stairs," I sobbed at him, in his arms. He (and everyone else) had already asked me if I felt dizzy, nauseous, if I'd blacked out, if I had any symptoms whatsoever of a series injury, and the answer was no, I don't think so, but the problem was of course that by that time I'd worked myself up so much that I did feel a bit dizzy just from the worry.

"Don't worry," he said to me, after I'd convinced him to help me look up head injuries online, after we'd ruled out together the possibility of concussion, "You're going to be fine." I decided to start blaming everyone else for my panic. "I wasn't worried until everyone else started saying things," I said, which was true, to an extent.

Having dramatized the event as much as possible, I decided it was finally time to settle down, take some Paracetemol, have some dinner, relax, and practice how I was going to tell this story to people in the days to come. I decided to acknowledge the fact that actually, I hadn't hit my head that hard; that by now, the only sore part of me (besides my ego) was the bit of broken skin at my temple. I decided all this was easier, in fact, than working myself up into an epic panic.

My relaxation was aided by a solid hour spent reading passages from Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, which sounds dull until you realize that they're riddled with gems like this one: "'That queer-looking man seems to like Dick,' said Anne."

***

And then I awoke the next day and in spite of a distinct tenderness near the wound, felt good, until my spirits were dampened by the din of the bills in the study, clamoring to be paid. I would pay you, I told them sternly as I tried to find an unoccupied slice of desk on which to put my tea and branflakes, if I could pay you, but you insist on being so large as to be unmanageable. In response, they just moaned some more, and huffed, and one or two even did a little angry jig atop my computer.

To ease my guilt and shut them up, I paid my half of the rent and my portion of the gas bill, which made me feel momentarily better, until I realized that I'm just about at the end of my coping-tether. The catalyst for this realization was the knowledge that I'd been wrongly charged £20 by a broken cashpoint in Fulham. For an instant I blamed Fulham (maybe the big smoke, knowing I've rejected it as a place to live, is somehow out to get me), but I couldn't hide for long from the fact that I'm a postgraduate student living in a graduate's world. I'm ignoring the credit crunch, the recession, the big scary black monster in the corner, whatever you want to call it, because my problems are deeper than that.

Here's how it is: I reached a point today where I no longer understood how I could go on like this. It baffled me, this realization. I actually sat down on the couch and pondered it. Because I've never been happier, emotionally, fundamentally. I have someone to love, and who loves me, and we live in a beautiful city and do beautiful (if not very lucrative) things, and our life is both exciting to me and soothing, gentle. But here I was on a glorious March morning wondering how we were going to pay those loud bills in the study after all, how, indeed, I was going to pay for groceries and to have the heel stuck back onto my boot and to get my coat, now impossibly soiled, dry-cleaned, how I was going to buy laundry detergent, do all of the little things that require money.

It's not that I don't work, it's that I don't work enough--but I can't work more, without sacrificing my masters degree (and, also, the legality of my visa--not to mention my sanity). In that bleak moment I couldn't stop myself from wondering if my fall down the stairs was not symbolic in some way, if perhaps I am not only falling but also hitting a wall in my work, my career (my career? What career?), my financial well-being.

But then, this evening at university, a successful and well-respected novelist began his chat with us by recounting how just yesterday, he'd been walking down his street, head turned, distracted by the for-sale signs on a pair of houses, when suddenly he smacked into the side of a metal pole, and look at the mark on the side of my head, he said.

So real writers have those moments too. And anyway, the really annoying thing about not having any money isn't not being able to pay the bills; it's not being able to buy the Man a really super birthday present.

Our First Mature Trip To London?

2009-03-24T22:32:00.003Z

Didn't start very encouragingly. Boxed red wine in the station ("it's like being with a rugby team," the Man kept saying). An impromptu train switch at Reading. The night already folding in on us. I'd been at work, then caught in a downpour, then at home, then late, then not late (a kindly friend had lied about the train time so I wouldn't miss it). It was suddenly cold again; what happened to the almost-summer of last week? Another world. I needed gloves. And maybe socks. On the tube a toddler bounced between his mother and his father, every shift on the tracks a new hazard. Many stops later (or maybe not so many; I forgot to keep track), a part of London unidentifiable to me. We walked against the wind. Fulham. You hear so much about Fulham, but until last night it was just another London name.

Past a nursing home. Everything looked suburban. Not expensive but empty, tired, devoid of spirit. Around a corner, a sudden pub. We ate round a long table. Potted shrimp, scotch eggs, salmon, terrine, soft bread. Mashed potatoes, curly kale, slabs of bleeding beef. The Man looked especially happy. "Are you happy?" I said, looking over the top of my red wine glass. "Meat," he grinned, reminding me of my dad's 50th birthday (picture: a barbecue pit by the beach, some friends, and nothing to eat but pounds and pounds of tri-tip, which my mother had bought thinking it was the manly food to get). I even got past my fear of meat that hasn't been cooked so well it looks black and enjoyed the tenderness (a little).

We sat on couches after. Shared an espresso, the Man and I, with a sugar cube. Back on the tube. We all shared no-hot-food-on-the-bus-back-to-Oxford horror stories (there are many). We were on the bus back before midnight. All so civilized. At St. Clements we alighted. As always I felt cold. I had to pee. I'd fallen asleep on the coach and my neck felt bent the wrong way. At home, relief, the sighs after a long night, but also a bewildered and delighted sense that neither of us had once considered screaming in frustration, this time.

Cheesy But So What

2009-03-24T22:23:00.002Z

I'm taking this as a good sign: after I had a minor meltdown in All Bar One this evening I came home to sulk in bed and read my news feeds, and what should I see but this little piece of advice:

"Do you have a dream? Do you really want to get published? Then quit with the excuses, get off your butt, and make the dream happen."

Inelegantly phrased, perhaps, and a little on the wrong side of cheesy, but like I said: so what. We all need a little of that every once in awhile, especially after recovering from some semi-public tear-shedding (is that embarrassment I sense?).

Sunday I'm in Love

2009-03-23T12:48:00.005Z

We sit in Christ Church meadows by the daffodils, watching a stream of toddlers drawn as if by magnetism to the mound of dirt beside the pathway. One rolls repeatedly down the mound until his father tells him they're moving on.
"I don't want to go," says the boy.
"Well, we're going, anyhow," says the father, and scoops up his other son, dissapears behind some trees. Dirtboy takes one last lackluster plunge through the mess, then sprints after his family.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can't plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I'm a little like that, too.
"I get the impression," he says, "that at the age of about four, you decided you'd mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read."

It's more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
"Is that because no one can see us?" I say.
"It's because it's a kissing gate, you moron," he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There's the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton's book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
"I find the idea that we're all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely," I say. "Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company."
"I'm not sure that's what that means," he says. Whether he's right or not I don't know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. "It's just about completion."

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I'm in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton's relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

Pages Devoid of Guilt

2009-03-21T22:53:00.004Z

The other day, Thursday, my day off, the sweetest thing possible in the middle of the week, I got a solid few hours' (writing) work done in town and decided to reward myself with the one thing I don't need more of: books. So here's how I spent the birthday Blackwell's gift certificate, at long last:

The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth
The Return of the Solider by Rebecca West
Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

The weight of them in my bicycle basket on the way home afforded me great happiness indeed. I've spent some time feeling them, smelling them, turning pages, reading paragraphs at random. This ritual of acquisition seems not ugly, as perhaps it should do in dire times (surely he who has a spare £20 to spend on books shouldn't do so with quite so much unrestrained glee), but kind, rewarding. I've found the one place that my overdeveloped sense of guilt doesn't stretch to, and it's nice to spend a few moments every so often here, smelling the books.

Drinking the City

2009-03-21T18:25:00.004Z

Except for the part where I sank ankle-deep in a hidden bog on the southern edge of South Parks, my run this evening was unbelievably beautiful. The sky , and pink blossoms everywhere, and a rain of fragrant white petals, and a red sun over the spires, which, in the thick dusky light, looked made of silver and dreams, hardly real, maybe not real at all. All the big trees lining the park were still bare and through black boughs a wind came wafting.

I know it sounds strange to say (and not a little unhealthy), but sometimes I like going for a run when I'm already a little thirsty. That way the cool air feels like something to drink. I am drinking the city, I like to think. (Then I self-consciously remember that line from Belle and Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field": "You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body.")

After I got a stitch in my side running down Divinity Road I walked for a bit. It occurred to me that I need more walks in my life. (They wash the mind, clarify the thoughts, allow fully formed sentences to appear like ghosts in my head.)

Home again, I took the laundry down from the line outside. Earlier we ate bacon sandwiches in the garden. I don't know if the Man did it just to humour me or not, but we sipped pineapple juice, and he read me an op-ed piece on Obama while I read him Tim Dowling at the supermarket checkout. At one point I laughed so hard I worried the bite I'd just taken would drop right out of my mouth. Now the dark has sagged over East Oxford. The kitchen is glowing yellow (the yellow walls make that happen, I think). My very muddy shoes are in the middle of the hallway, and my left leg is spotted with dirt. I think I'll have a bath.

The Anxiety of Age

2009-03-21T00:43:00.002Z

I hear this in my head. I hear, I'm too young. I want to say, how can you be too young, but I don't say anything at all in response. I think, well, maybe I am. I look for evidence of it. Who got published at 22? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23 that was healthy and beautiful and went on and on and on? Who did anything meaningful at all at 22, except die, maybe. There were a lot of 22-year-olds, a lot of 20-year-olds even, who died in wars.

We live in such a perverse world. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. Opposition, contradiction. We value youth, we say. We want our Hollywood stars fresh-faced, wrinkle-free. But real youth--the youth measured not by lines on a forehead but by years, by how much we've done, by how much we haven't done--we disregard. We call it cute, we call it charming. We want our fashion models that way because we don't want our fashion models to be anything we respect. Then we draw a line.

All we've done is extend adolescence. When I was a teenager I used to think that the ideal age to be was somewhere in one's 20s. I used to think that that's what everyone craved. Teenagers wanted to be older, everyone else wanted to be younger. And now I find I've reached what I thought was the golden era, the time-of-all-times, only to learn that I'm still in the teenage-hood of society. Nobody thinks a 20-something can do anything worthwhile, because we're, as they say, still learning.

This has turned into more of a diatribe than I meant it to be. All I meant it to be was a thought: that here I am, paying my own rent, expected to make a fool of myself. I know what I write now will, in ten year's time, be irrelevant; I know my tone will change, my voice, my point of view. But still, I'd like to think that if I'm old enough to support myself, I'm old enough to be trusted with my own heart, my own soul.

Living in a Yurt in Kathmandu? I Saw the Status Update.

2009-03-19T12:37:00.002Z

Has Facebook made the high school reunion redundant?

Yes, I realize I'm delving into the trite and the technical, but a few months ago I received an invite to my high school reunion and, to steal a phrase from Carrie Bradshaw (not something I ever saw myself doing, ever), I couldn't help but wonder: in an era where every breath we take is published and publicized, what's the point?

I saw myself standing with my colleagues on the campus where we spent our awkward years, nodding my head. "Oh, so you're working in finance? Yeah, I thought I saw that on Facebook. Married? I noticed your relationship status had changed. Babies? Your album was cute. Grad school? Running your own business? Running seven marathons a year? Converting to Mormanism? Living in a yurt in Kathmandu? I saw the status update."

In the heady days before Facebook, when it was possible for someone you'd spent four intensely uncomfortable years with to slip completely off your radar in a day, I envisaged the high school reunion with some satisfaction. My social discomfort at the time, my shy, blushing-at-everything countenance, made me the perfect candidate for a major five-years-later comeback. I would breeze into the room looking gorgeous and tanned (why do we think that tanned is somehow an indicator of good physical and emotional health?), my hair styled precisely to the trends of the moment, my clothes impressive in their well-tailored flattery and their obvious expense. I would have someone at my arm from well outside the sphere of the Santa Ynez Valley--an Englishman, preferably, who I'd met in New York City, where I'd settled after college to finish my novel (the one with the big advance) and write an enormously popular column. I would be a little tired--just got back from a trip to South Africa, research for my next book, you know--but the transformation from angst-ridden outcast to real-world success would be stunning.

But here's the truth of it: we can't shock each other anymore. Everyone I'm friends with on Facebook is already going to know what I look like these days, that I'm living abroad, that I'm getting another degree. If they read this blog they'll even know that I'm poorer than dirt and have no wildly popular column to boast about. We grew up with each other, my classmates and I, but then (and we were really the first generation to do this) we continued growing up with each other, remotely. We saw all the college relationships, distilled to a single line ("in a relationship with...", "it's complicated with.."), all the parties, distilled to a wittily-named online album. We saw the shifts in geography, the aquisition of degrees (or not), the weddings, the children, the message that so-and-so wrote to so-and-so. What's left to tell?

I ask myself, too: am I bitter because I'm not going? In that sophomore-year vision of an eight-year-older me, I never once considered skipping the event. But here I am, and the pressures of adulthood dictate that I stay put at the end of April, remain in Oxford, with (go figure) my Englishman, working on (go figure again) my book, living my already very public life. (But frankly, the way the weather is looking today, you couldn't pay me to miss Oxford in full springtime bloom.)

A very close friend of mine wrote me a letter recently. "To be perfectly honest," she wrote, "I think without you there I would be reverted back to the shy/awkward/semingly semi-retarded person I was at Dunn," and the awful truth is, so would I. I can picture the scene much more clearly on this side of graduation. I would stand there, with my loyal Englishman at my arm, looking nice, dressed well, holding in my head the knowledge of my in-process book, my Oxford life, the places I've been, the places I'll go, and I would become as dumb and uncomfortable as I was at 15.

Maybe I ought to be happy that Facebook has made it possible for me to feel smug without ever having to set foot on the campus of my alma mater. Maybe it's not that Facebook has made the high school reunion redundant, exactly; it's that it's made it redundant for people who only ever considered going for the shallow aim of proving a point (i.e., you were wrong about me; in fact, I was wrong about myself). Maybe it's that it will make the event less about showing off and more about socializing in a genuine way.

I'll never know--but, because I can, because this is the world we're living in and this is who I am in it now, I'll blog about it anyway.

The Breathing Space Between Hilary and Trinity

2009-03-17T21:37:00.006Z

My mood at the moment: lustful. I lust for longer days, warmer evenings, summer dresses. I lust for new clothes (I spend hours at the computer, clicking photographs of things I can't afford). I lust for the glow of inspiration to sparkle into a frenzy of of productivity. And by wanting this so much, I stay stuck (it's the trickery of Spring).

The city has emptied herself again, tipped the students out, and we see who is left. "The arselickers who stayed," Philip Larkin called them (called us). But all I can think is that now that they are gone I will go to the Bodleian and get lost amongst the books.

Suddenly Monday nights are blank in a good way, they are quiet again, and as I glide wraithlike down the High street under eleven o'clock darkness there might be no one but me in all the city, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor, in his cloud of grease and chip smells, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor and the ghosts crawling over the college walls, frolicking in the gardens while they can.

(The Man gets home late, I hear him undressing and the birds starting to wake simultaneously; he slips into bed beside me while the night is melting into morning, and our window is wide open).

I forget how still Jericho is. On Plantation Road I lean against the curb with my bicycle, so warm I've shed even my cardigan, and wait for a few minutes just to feel the sun and the stillness. Later a friend and I sit in the garden with a bottle of strong beer between us, chasing a pool of sunshine to the edge of the grass. It's like a wilderness this far away from the house, hugging the brambles coming over the fence.

We talk of Africa. I haven't been to Africa, I almost say, but the truth is that I have. I forget that I have; the Africa I've been to is smoky, spicy, sultry in the way I imagine the Middle East to be (but how would I know?). Not the Africa I used to dream about. But then, we all have different Africas, maybe; and I think about how complicated our relationship with place is, anyway, how much love and experience it takes to get to the root of it.

Later I meet the Man for a drink; we should go back to Fés soon, he says, apropos of nothing, nothing but the strange exhilaration which has overtaken everyone now that the weather is turning warm again. Is it really only the warmth, the clarity of light, that makes us believe in the glory of the future, the adventure of a summer, again?

Funny, I think.

Reading...*

2009-03-16T12:59:00.006Z

I'm doing a reasonable amount of reading at the moment. Revisiting Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (secretly thinking, ok, if she can win a Booker, why can't I?), alongside heavy perusal of a book called Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War by Peter Leese. This may or may not be research for something; it remains to be seen (or admitted).

Also finishing Beloved. My opinion of it this time around is cloudy at best. It's a shame, because my hatred for it was so pure for so many years. Overwritten, overwrought, over-hyped. Simple. Now I think, there may be no joy in reading it, but maybe I was a little hard on Toni Morrison, because sometimes there's something just this side of beautiful about the whole thing. Maturity breeds indecision, it would seem.

Also on my mind: Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk, which I'm strolling through for structural and narrative inspiration (this may or may not be the reason for my recent obsession with seasons).

*The title of this post refers not to "Reading" the place but in fact the act of "reading" a book, to clarify any possible confusion...

Midmarch

2009-03-16T11:29:00.003Z

On the way to work, sudden blossoms. They came overnight. First the delicate yellow flowers outside our front door, now, on the trees, a bloom of white. It's warm enough to cycle in ballet flats, no socks--that's a good warm, it's all I'd ask of March. Yesterday, we ate lunch outside, in the garden.

With these sudden blossoms comes, too, a sudden remembrance of my love for the city. I hope this infusion of affection seeps into the work I'm doing on the book. The freeze of winter has made me cold about the project, not lacking in theoretical enthusiasm but lacking in the ability to translate thought into word. I've been drawn into myself like a creature curled in its own shell. I wouldn't want to make this malady specific, wouldn't want it to lose its poetry by pinpointing it preciesely, giving it a name, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Then again, perhaps it's like the aquisition of a degree: Miranda Ward, GAD, SAD. (Or, indeed, like a Dr. Seuss rhyme).

But I don't think it's like this. I think what I feel in winter is a choice. I like to wrap myself in the cocoon of my own worries, like to hibernate in my study, fretting, picking at my own fingers, sighing, watching the naked trees, thinking that my projects are languishing, my ability shrinking. It makes the transition to Spring sweeter, makes me feel like, as soon as the blossoms come, I can shed my ugly countenance, wear something nicer for the Summer.

I wasn't always like this. I'm a California girl, you see; not obsessed with seasons, not even aware of them except for the changes in light and the subtle shift of colour. I write this often, so it must be important to me. I write, often, too, of how my time in Boston made me aware of something I'd never known before, about my own reaction to the malleability of days, my own obsession with the weather. (The Man says that when I enthuse about temperature or sun or rain in the way that I can, sometimes, I become in that moment almost perfectly British.)

But still, here we are, at the edge. I'm hoping that the expanding sunlight makes the work, too, expand, so that it fills the days like blossoms and warmth. Punting weather, garden weather.

In Between the Crack of the Bed and the Wall

2009-03-14T19:03:00.004Z

My knees are stiff from being bent in the same position for hours. My papers are spread across the couch like a dropped deck of cards. As part of my research, I started putting post-its on a map of Oxford earlier but they've all come off (the map to limp, the post-its too acquiescent) and now at my feet is a puddle of pink strips. I've been picking continuously at my right pinky all day. Earlier, I had a glorious run in the almost-sunshine, wearing shorts, which I haven't done in so long, followed by an hour-long bath, in which I listened to classic.fm and read Pat Barker's Regeneration, so my head is full of choral music and shell-shocked dreams. Every time I think about what I'm working on I feel a tiny jolt of panic.

"Don't let your silly dreams fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall," I hear, and I think, I'm trying not to, really.

In short, I need to get out of the house.

Here in the House which was the Site of Our Budding Love

2009-03-14T11:57:00.006Z

I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We're in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it's Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don't want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we've lived here--how long? nearly two years?--it fits us. It owns us if we don't own it.

I think about this sometimes (I've probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that's too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don't think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?--say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it's early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we're here, they aren't just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o'clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven't actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that's what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I've been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn't swim in Walden Pond after all.)

I'd like to wear a summer dress, today; or a pair of cutoff denim shorts, like I am seven again, and a fluttery blouse that lifts in the gentle wind. I'd like to see all of our clothes--his shirts, my knickers--our sheets--hanging on the line in the garden. That's the nicest thing, here, in summer. Looking over the fences and seeing that everybody on the street has hung their washing outside.

And the days of the barbecues. Walk outside in the early Sunday afternoon, smell the char and the smoke from next door, or from your own garden. One day we spend hours outside, into the night, lying on a blanket. The boys burn old pieces of wood in the barbecue just for fun. We leave all the plates and bowls outside until the next morning.

So it's funny to think that for all that, it isn't ours (ownership being a thing about money, not memory). Still, here we are on a Saturday, doing our laundry, our dishes, he bringing me tea while I work, Billie Holiday drowned out by the sound of the washing machine shuddering its way through another load, passing through this in-between season and into another.

The Friday Dump

2009-03-13T12:15:00.004Z

My brain, today, has decided to be very basic. I mean that I don't feel capable of complicated thought or action. And I don't know for sure what the inside of my head looks like (thankfully), but I'm imagining it full of words. Today those words are as follows:

eat
sleep
eat more
sleep more
run?
write
hate work
meh

Fridays are the worst. Every Thursday evening, after hours of class, after reading, after pondering the next stage of my book (which I am, by the way, totally overthinking now), I feel both intellectually stimulated and emotionally/physically exhausted. More than that, I feel the overwhelming urge NOT TO GO TO WORK ON FRIDAY, because I know that what I'd rather do is sleep in and then spend the day eating at my desk and writing. But because we have to pay this thing called rent (and indeed our bills, which always come floating through the letterbox at the worst possible times), what I do instead is wake up, stagger round the house eating cereal and trying to remember how to dress myself, leave the house, cycle halfway down Hurst Street, realize by seeing my own reflection in a car window that I've completely forgotten my helmet, cycle back home, retrieve the helmet, head to work.

It's an impossible situation, really. As soon as I get to work I remember that as far as jobs go, mine isn't half bad, and I like the people that I work with, I like that it's a school, I like, moreover, that they pay me regularly. And I know that to a certain extent it's good to have one foot on the ground, so to speak; last summer when I wasn't working I was so fretful about money, and about how I was spending my time, that I forgot what the real world is like, and neglected to write as much as I could (and should) have. But I know this is not what I want to be doing, this photocopying, filing, organizing job, and I know that come September, when I have another degree and (hopefully) a manuscript, I'll need to make some decisions. Days like this make me think the decisions will be easy; but the truth is they won't.

Funnily Enough, Stephen King, There ARE Exceptions

2009-03-11T08:49:00.004Z

So I got up "early" this morning (read: not five minutes before I have to leave for work) so that I could write something, but now I'm going to scrap that something in favor of something else. See, I opened up Firefox this morning and saw my Google quote of the day (yeeeeah....I'm a certifiable nerd), courtesy of Stephen King:

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

At first I thought, okay, fair enough. I see what he's saying. If you have to search for something it's probably not going to be the most natural word in the sentence, it might obscure the meaning, it isn't necessary, blah blah blah.

But then I thought, hang on. Stephen's success is undeniable, but it's not for his, er, literary prowess that he's famous so much as for his accessibility. Am I wrong? Am I missing something brilliant about the way he crafts phrases? Because last time I checked, I wouldn't actually want to write like Stephen, no matter how much I'd love to reach his level of (monetary) achievement.

(And do you know what? I just used an online thesaurus to find an alternative to the word "success" ("achievement") because, frankly, it's earlier than I'm usually up and my brain isn't working properly and SUE ME, STEPHEN.)

My writing process has changed over the years, though not drastically, but I'll tell you one way in which it has: I'm a more careful writer today. Part of what I do when I write something which isn't rushed and ranty (i.e. this) is spend a lot of time considering individual words. I will actually stop halfway through a sentence and reconsider one word because the rhythm is off, say. And in instances like that I find searching for synonyms is not so much like searching for answers as for inspiration.

So in short, I beg to differ, Stephen.

Recently

2009-03-10T22:44:00.002Z

I have a new song obsession. These things come over me suddenly, and when they do, I pity anyone who has to share a house with me (in this case, the Man). Hearing the same rhythms over-and-over-again-for-hours-upon-hours. But it makes me more productive. Or maybe it's that I obsess when I'm already feeling productive. I don't know which and, frankly, the whole thing is weird enough that I don't really know if I want to delve any deeper.

(Because you asked, here's my current favorite. Click on "Golly Sandra" to hear what my house sounds like at the moment.)

A lot of people recently have said to me, "I don't know where the autumn went, how is it already a new year, how is it already mid-March?" and I've been saying back, "I don't know, but I feel the same way." As humans, we're incapable of processing time in the way we think we're supposed to. But then I looked at my calendar and I realized that I probably feel this way because I had something happening EVERY FREAKING DAY IN NOVEMBER. Sometimes poetry doesn't explain things as well as I like to think.

Lately, I've been on a constant sock-and-stocking hunt. I've actually altered outfits because I can't find the right garments for my feet. I don't know where they go, exactly, but I do think I know what they're telling me: it's about time for Spring. Bare legs, bare feet.

Speaking of which--I've been seeing blossoms. Not fully-fledged, springtime-is-here blossoms, but the sweetest little buds. There are some by our front door. It's nice.

In the Stone Circle, the Unpronouncable Village, the Widest High Street in Britain, the Place Where the Thames Starts

2009-03-09T12:41:00.010Z

After we arrive in Bedwyn, I tell the Man that my right boot is still making funny sounds.
"Funny sounds?" he says.
"Yeah. Like a horse clopping down the road."
I shake my right foot. I can feel something jiggling. I've had this feeling off-and-on since we came back from New York. He follows the movement of my leg.
"It's because your HEEL IS ABOUT TO FALL OFF," he tells me.
I look down. The heel of my boot is dangling from several rusty nails. Several questions pop into my head all at once. How have I not noticed this before? Why did I somehow think that the jiggling was coming from the toe of my boot? And, more pressing still: how am I going to cope with a broken boot in a village so small that the first cab driver we call says, "oh no, sorry, I'm just having myself a cup of tea, I can't pick you up"?

In Avebury, where we end up after a pint and a perusal of the Guardian whilst waiting for the third cab driver we call to arrive, we meet up with friends and I am able to borrow the wellies of an 11-year-old boy whose feet are definitely at least a size bigger than mine. The Man gestures wildly as we stand on a windy ridge overlooking a circle of giant stones (only in England); he punches a hole in his Barbour.
"We're a mess," I say. I like our mess, but still.

It's overcast and the children want to climb the stones, roll down the hills. A humourless pair of English hippies in moon-patterned trousers and tie-dye jumpers tries to stop them: in future re-tellings of this story (and there will be many), they say, Don't climb the rocks. This is our temple; this is our Church. But in all truth they do not say this, just look disapprovingly, just bark . They remind me of the puckered old woman in the Great Tew church telling us: What do they think this is, a nursery? In my day children would never be allowed to play in a place like this. The hippies with their sour countenance, their wild hair and ugly demeanor, move on. Ned the puppy pulls me along the side of a hill. We have no time for hippy temples, for rules or regulations. Only time to stand windblown on a ridge, to watch children rolling so fast and so far it makes us fret (but briefly).

In Mildenhall which is pronounced Minal we sleep above the pub. There is no store in the village and no school; the people are rooted to the place only through a town hall and an eating-and-drinking establishment. We mention we might want a taxi to the train station after dinner.
"A taxi?" says the woman.
"Oooh I dunno about that," says the man. We feel like the city-slickers, even in our torn Barbours, our too-big wellies.

So we stay; in a room which is the essence of the English bed-and-breakfast. Shabby floral curtains, pulled back to reveal the pub sign, the cobbled pavement, the thatched cottages across the narrow street. Upholstered chairs, worn and soft. An ugly purple duvet, a flowery third pillow.

"Why are there three pillows?" I want to know. The Man holds up the third pillow.
"Just look at it," he says. Then he hits his head on the mantelpiece-above-the-bed.
"Why is there a mantelpiece above the bed?" I also want to know, but the simple answer is that there is no why; the why is in its existing at all. And in the morning, we have a greasy and delicious full English breakfast while the owners' three black poodles wander around the front room like a trio of furry balloon animals.

Passing through Marlborough; the widest High Street in Britain, though you wouldn't think it now. Just a parking lot now--a thick row of vehicles clogging up the centre. But look at a picture of it a hundred years ago and it is impressive. Like a sea between the two sides of the road.

Now past the place where the Thames starts.
"Look, you know the Thames, the Thames in London, this is where it begins," says the boys' mother, one hand on the wheel, pointing over the bridge.
"We know the Thames is in London," says one of the boys, pouting, pressing his face against the side of the car. "You don't have to keep saying, 'the Thames in London.'"
"But look," we say, "this is where it starts, isn't that incredible?" And then the Man adds, "and it goes through Oxford, too. It splits into two, but it's still the Thames."

(And then we can't remember, for a bit, which is the Isis and which is the Cherwell.)

Burford suddenly feels like home, because it's the Cotswolds--Cotswold stone, Cotswold colour. I am lost in the map of England, it's swallowed me completely, and every foray from the city where we live feels like magic and mystery (and so does every re-entry).

Oxford, Late Winter, Evening

2009-03-06T17:59:00.005Z

I like to watch the steeples puncturing the sunset as I cycle home, showering the city with blood-orange colours, setting the tops of buildings alight. Such precise buildings: the filigree, the sculpted domes, the golden windows. The roads seem wider at this hour, and unpaved. I go towards home, towards the pub with the rusty bicycle outside, towards the café where magic (they say) happens. Towards the bare-wood-planked edifice of our love.

Earlier I ran mundane errands. I bought ugly things, useful things. I hate to spend my money on ugly, useful things. Razors, shampoo, tampons, condoms. I went to the self-checkout because I did not want to be seen. Please let them not think that this is what I do, what I do, in my red pencil skirt, my leather heeled brogues, my rust-coloured coat, after work, on a Friday evening. Let them not think that this city and this life has become so prosaic for me, because that would be an unfair representation, and even if I buy razors and tampons on a Friday evening while the air and the light is shimmering all around us, I also...

...have this thought: cycling to work, early morning. The sun coming down the wide, empty (unpaved) High. I had forgotten how much I love to see the city in this light. The closed, sour winter-me, so suddenly self-obsessed, so willing to be saddened or hardened, moved by the temperature, the darkened days, had forgotten this very simple thing; but all it took was a touch of light upon my skin to remember it.

(Still, strolling down Turl Street, I see a stationer is closing its doors for good, and in the Covered Market, past the fresh meat and leather and hot cookies, several shops wear signs: Sale. Last few days. Everything must go. I have thought for so long that the economy does not touch me, because I am poor anyway, I am in the throes of youth, but maybe, I think, I will miss the stationer, where I once bought a set of notecards, and the shop in the covered market where I once bought a blue satin clutch to go with my dress for a friend's wedding.)

Wednesday Morning in the Countryside

2009-03-04T11:31:00.003Z

This morning, after we awoke to the sounds of an electric guitar and feeling of two terriers bouncing on our bed, after we packed the kids off to school (no, not our kids and no, not our terriers), after we cleaned up the puppy poo from the floor and loaded the dishwasher (alas, also not our dishwasher--a dishwasher being in my mind the height of domestic luxury) and bought cinammon rolls from the shop next door, we indulged, whilst waiting for a taxi to take us back to our real life in Oxford, in some television.

Some people, channeling fond memories of childhood, might opt for cartoons or sitcoms, but as the Man and I were not television children, and neither are we in the least bit ordinary, our greatest TV pleasure is anything that has to do with houses. Programs about selling houses, buying them, rennovating them, decorating them, living in them: it doesn't matter. We both seem to have this sickening need to scoff at how badly other people have designed their bathrooms, and/or drool over their opportunities for buying (and therefore fixing up) property.

This morning it was a program called "Wanted Down Under". A family was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to stay in Britain or make the move to Australia, and we followed them on a house-hunting expedition, slightly sullen teenage son in tow. Then it was "Axe the Agent", which, sadly, we only got middway through before our cab arrived. The family with the seven-bedroom house had just finished cleaning it up, but I still wouldn't buy it (too reminiscant of the sprawling ultra-new California mansions I loathed as a youth).

I don't know quite what it says about us that the sort of television we most enjoy watching is on at 10 am on a weekday morning.

Keeping Calm in the Year of the Plants

2009-03-02T17:56:00.007Z

I need to start making some big decisions about the, er, book. It's reaching a point where I can no longer afford not to know, for instance, how it ends, or how it's structured. The problem, of course, is that in over-thinking these things, I've forced myself into a dark, dark corner. In this corner, nothing makes the least bit of sense, and things I thought I knew about the book (that it's written in first person, for instance) are shadowed with extreme doubt. Basically, this means that, at a moment when writing this book has never been so important, I can't actually write it. It may sound painfully inadequate, but...whoops.

Amidst a week of running into a brick wall, falling over, climbing up again, running back into the wall (who was it who said that stupidity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?), I also had a birthday, which has turned out to be the birthday of the plants. Three separate friends, completely independently, entrusted a living thing to me in honour of my advancing age. Apart from the fact that I quite like plants, I'm also trying to see this as a good omen, a metaphor for the creative process that I'm finding so difficult at the moment. It just needs nurturing (and, occasionally, a walk through the sunny garden, as my miniature yew tree apparently requires on a semi-regular basis).

Should, Want

2009-03-01T13:29:00.002Z

Things I Should Do Today:

go for a run
make soup
do the laundry
write at least something related to the book

Things I Want To Do Today:

sit on the couch bathed in sunlight
have a nap

Notes on New York City V

2009-02-28T13:12:00.005Z

In the museum, people move with false reverence. What we're affected by is not so much the painting, the sculpture, the historical or the avant-garde--it's the way we're all here together, but all separated by experience.

In front of my favourite Monet (and why should this be my favourite, this image of a cathedral I have never seen, cast in a light I have never experienced?), two women with their studying faces on. One (short dark hair, glasses, very still), hands crossed at chest; the other (longer dark hair, full of nervous energy), hands placed at the small of her back, bag worn across her chest and in front, as if she's afraid of something, wants to hold her possesions close. They seem to be looking for something in the painting, something, perhaps, in the cathedral itself. Sharing (or trying to recall) a memory that neither of them actually owns. I want to sit in front of the painting, as I do every time I am here (there is a bench placed before it as if just for me) but they distort my view, they may as well have stepped into the image itself, and I'm too fascinated by watching them watch it to pay any real attention to Rouen Cathedral.

Walker Evans' collection of postcards. Americana distilled. The streets were wider then; no, that's not right, they were only emptier. People against a patchwork backdrop: LA, Nashville, church spires, telephone wires. Shiny black automobiles, from the days when they could still be called "automobiles," still had some dignity.

Gauguin's Tahiti is enough to make anyone crave a warmer place. I photograph it in black and white to see what, when the image is bled of colour, is left. Still something, I'll tell you that much.

Irrisistible for the artist to make a sketch. One girl, on the floor, cross-legged, pony-tailed, makes a sketch of a lumpy, pasty female nude. Her breasts uneven (the nude, not the girl). A man, in flat cap and scarf, has brought his own folding chair, sits before a scultpure, balances his pad on his knees. People peer over his shoulder; the rendition is good, exact.

Back on the street, the Upper East Side, the sunlight is almost too much after the shadowed light, the light made for looking at things. We squint our way down Park Avenue. There's nothing to eat in the Upper East. What, I say, do rich people not need to eat? Do they, I ask, as we pass Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior, get their sustenence from expensive shoes and ugly handbags? Do they get off on knowing that we will find their wide-avenued world unpenetrable?

Probably, the Man says, to shut me up. I'm hungry, therefore irrational.

Notes on New York City IV

2009-02-24T23:30:00.004Z

Nothing here is as it seems. The museum in black and white; it's not the paintings we care about, really, it's the people looking at them, isn't it? Karl Rove in Federal Hall, touring the Lincoln exhibit. (He has a crushing laugh, loud and ugly). The shop that proclaims to be "your 24 hour pot dealer" is really only an emporium for vases decorated with nipples. A barbershop proudly displays posters of boys wearing perfect bowl-cuts, men in mullets. Another features images of men in tight boxer shorts, dancing with their hair straighteners. Am I in a Dr. Seuss book? (Oh, the places--) Unnecessary quotation marks everywhere. How about this one: "free soup" with any sandwich! A plaque tells of a place called The Highway Leading to the Fortification Called Oyster Pasty. A friend takes us up the steps of a church; look closer, he says, so we lean towards the cathedral pillars and see a baby's head emerging from a vaginal cornstalk.

All the absurdities. A sign that tells us both to cross the street and not to cross the street at the same time; even the signals have become confused, here. The windows of Bergdorf Goodman's look as rich as any painting in the Met. I find a place outside Trinity Church where the Queen stood in the 1970s; Prince Philip, reads the inscription in the tile, stood nearby. Oh, no photographs, not here, says the woman selling posters at the flea market, and I retreat from her snarls and stumble into a rack of fur coats, brown and white, urban bears. On Madison Avenue, our first night in the city, cold and hungry, we look across the broad street (broad as an ocean) and see the Oxford Café. Seen from a certain angle, the statue of first world war soldiers on the eastern edge of Central Park becomes real; shadowy men pierce a wintry tree with freshly sharpened bayonets (do bayonets need to be sharpened?).

And I have a photograph to prove every single one of these things; but as one placard in the museum points out: "a photograph of an angel is either a miracle or a hoax." (Even the photograph in this post is merely a reflection).

Notes on New York City III

2009-02-23T18:39:00.004Z

On the subway, rumbling under the map of Manhattan, somewhere or other beneath the dots, the lines and grids, the green space of parks, the skyscraper dreamscape, I read this:

"Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people."

It is Don Delilo, White Noise. Five years ago or so, I tried to read White Noise. It was an assignment and I rallied against it with all my will; I threw my late-teenage energy, such as it was, into hating the novel, into finding it blasé, so over, so dated, so not something I could relate to. Now I read it in between subway stops. 81st street and 42nd street are the bookends for one chapter; 14th and 72nd frame another. I find myself transfixed. Why is this, my dad wants to know, why the change of heart? I say maybe it's because I failed to see the humour in it the first time around. I say maybe it's because I was too afraid to recognize certain anxieties as being mine, too; that maybe it's because, now that I openly own these anxieties, I can allow myself to enjoy the language.

Here's a situation. Bryant Park. It's fashion week but the only people outside the white tents are the nobodies, the people who work for the people who work for the people who do something related to fashion, and they're badly dressed, they look cold, so we skirt the park. On the library side we try to identify the buildings around us. Lit up; dizzying. A man in a baseball cap comes close, asking for spare change. My reaction is always to turn the other way. I become absorbed in a bench. Is it some sort of denial, or is it just smart? I can hear him talking to the Man, and the Man's two brothers, twins, nine years his junior.

"You take care of your sons," the beggar tells the Man. I don't know where this places me. And the funniest thing of all of course is that he does take care of them, as if they were his sons; and when he drops them off at the airport, leaves them there, he frets for their safety, their peace of mind.

***

"It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city," Delilo writes. "All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography."

I always liked the subway. I like it more now, and I have Delilo's staccato words in my head whenever I mount the steps. I have no way of knowing whether the sentences that start to form when the cold sunlight hits my face are mine or his; but they end up being mine, twisted into something that only I could say. That's all ownership is--and anyway, nobody owns anything here.

Notes on New York City II

2009-02-22T01:38:00.003Z

The thing about jet lag is this: it doesn't just mess with your sense of time, it messes with your sense of place. This is a far more serious offense. Time is nebulous enough on its own that when, for a few days, we've totally lost track of it, when we're hours ahead of or behind ourselves, we feel that maybe it is, this secret force we live by, just asserting itself for awhile.

Place is different. There's nothing so off-putting as falling asleep in the late afternoon, knowing you're in Oxford, and waking up convinced you're in New York, and being therefore in a New York state of mind, and realizing only by the voices outside, crawling their way home after an evening at the pub, only by the smell of your house (a nice smell, a specific smell), that your body is still where you left it hours earlier to sleep.

I don't know how to count the hours, speaking of them. And I never know how to describe the time before a transatlantic flight: is it yesterday that we left, really, truly? I can hardly convince myself that this can be so--that yesterday, whatever that means, we woke up late, we had lattes and bagels, we took the subway to midtown, and then again back uptown, we ate a Korean lunch across the street from Columbia. And I ask this, not to be pedantic or navel-gazing, particularly, but because I genuinely do not know how to answer it: was it yesterday or today or some time in-between that we sat eating croissants at an altitude so high it is usually reserved for our hopes and dreams alone, that I wondered, because my mind had gone numb in the hours of no movement while we sped over an ocean, if the correct way to spell student was s-t-u-d-e-n-t or s-t-u-d-a-n-t? My copy of White Noise now bears proof of this struggle, but I don't know exactly when the struggle occured. Student. Studant. Student. If I spell it wrong, will they let me back into the country? (In the end, I spelled it right).

***

Photography is banned at the Institute of Contemporary Photography. Never mind irony, or paradox, or, indeed, copyright: there was a large part of me that wanted to turn round upon seeing this sign, back into the night wind, that wanted to say, even though admission was free, this isn't worth it. Because I've started to become convinced that the value of a gallery or a museum or an exhibition space has almost nothing to do with the art being viewed. It's about the art being created, the human traffic, the art that could potentially be created as a result. If I keep following this train of thought I realize of course that this is impossible, that only in a futile world could things be so: surely a passive audience is necessary, if for nothing but to stroke an artist's fragile ego, reassure him that his work has some value, at least in terms of time.

But time. One time, we took the metro, from the village to the upper west side. As we were underground, staring at our own feet, moving fast through a rare darkness, things happened outside. Rain fell. Night fell. Things we couldn't know until we re-emerged. Before we alighted at our station I looked at the bookmark in my novel, a thank-you note from a friend. Our Oxford address on it. I liked the way the address looked, the way the country (England) was not specified, the way our last names (Ward, Cansell, things that identify us in ways we can not change) were not specified. It seemed friendly, familiar, small in a city where nothing and everything is small.

Notes on New York City I

2009-02-16T03:37:00.002Z

The last time I was here: two years ago, almost to the day. A good friend and I meet for a drink this time, late in the evening, at the bar of the same hotel we stayed in then. I am, as always, delighted by the circular. Still there seems suddenly to be a strange disconnect between my life in Oxford and my being here. I feel in-between. This is not a place I've ever called home (Boston or California, say), but not a place completely new to me, either. I am in my own country, but things that used to seem prosaic now delight me (lemon flavored iced tea, Smartfood, Banana Republic).

We go to Times Square to feel small, at the mercy of flashing lights and a crowd with no beginning and no end, no direction, no understanding of time or place. The wide boulevards of the Upper West Side seem like temporary home. We all go to the Met, we all enter the same museum, but when we leave it's like we went to six different places and talk past each other. My Met was in black and white, all modern, all about the people, not the art. The Man's, I think, was Renaissance and photography. Maybe this is a metaphor for the city, but I don't know yet.

In the hotel room which is hot and small and comfortable I am typing on a computer that is not mine thinking that sleep is what I crave, because by the rhythms of my body clock it is darkest morning. I sleep well here, and heavy. My dreams are infused by the sense of this city and the memory of other places. Sometimes I think that my dreams, and not my thoughts, are the perfect manifestation of a home-like feeling, but when I wake up I can never recapture it in any terms but the most abstract.

How to Pack for a Midwinter Vacation

2009-02-13T12:34:00.005Z

Make sure ahead of time that your day is as full as possible (I'm talking 7 hours of class full)
Sleep in
Skip lunch; do a load of laundry instead so that all your clothes will still be wet by evening
Leave the house
8 hours later, have two pints of Addlestone's on a semi-empty stomach
Head home and toss some stuff in a bag

Oddly enough, this may have turned out to be one of the smoothest packing jobs in my personal history. No wardrobe crises, no major omissions (like, oh shit, I forgot SHOES), no sitting on the suitcase to make it shut. Go us.

In other, more exciting news, the Man and I are headed to New York City for the week. If you live there, have lived there, are visiting, have visited--let me know. I want suggestions for groovy off-the-beaten-path things to do. We have wifi at our hotel so I'll blog as often as possible...

House of Words

2009-02-12T11:18:00.018Z

I'm on a bit of a design kick these days. Last week the Man and I went for a lovely dinner with some friends, and then spent the entire ten minute walk home discussing how we would re-do their kitchen if it was ours. We didn't even get to the rest of the house.

I have also developed a--let's call it a "healthy interest"--in bookshelves. Anyone who's been to our house knows that the Man and I don't seem to believe in any form of decorating except to pile the books a little higher. But if we were a little wealthier, we could have some seriously cool bookshelves, as the following photos illustrate. Who needs art when you have these?

Having said that, the Man and I are cultivating a fondness for big, bold prints like these ones, discovered courtesy of this blog:
The more I think about it, we seem to be literally building a house of words (here I am, a writer, and here he is, a researcher). I think the visual manifestation of this started with this print, which the Man picked up from work (on the other side, it's actually a promo poster for Penguin):Our most recent acquisition is a fabulous little print from the lovely Badaude, who offered a wonderful books-for-artwork exchange last month. Since we are already the proud owners of the print she was offering, and since we are neighbors, we popped over one chilly evening for a glass of wine and a perusal through some really rather stunning stuff. I'm such a fan of this sort of old-fashioned bartering system, and, as the Man pointed out, there's something weighty about owning a piece of art that you have a personal tie to. (When he said this I suddenly remembered going to Santa Barbara with my parents as a child, to this artist's studio, and how my favorite paintings growing up were always the two we'd chosen on that day.)

It was a tough choice, but here's what we've ended up with from Badaude (the photo doesn't do the incredible green real justice). It's called "wake-up call" and the man in the middle is, the artist told us, actually Edgar Allen Poe, though she hadn't realized it at first. How apropriate:

Lost in Translation?

2009-02-11T11:14:00.004Z

So today, my results for the first term of my masters came out. As a certifiably competitive-geeky-academic-type (I don't necessarily want to be like this, and I know it's silly, but I always, always want the A), this meant lots of excitement and anticipation for me this morning. The first thing I did when I got to work was log in to check my marks, and sure enough, there they were...

It was only then that I realized I have absolutely no concept of the UK grading system. The numbers were meaningless. What a cruel irony for poor little me. An online search fixed the problem, but it also reaffirmed something that I have a tendency to forget these days: I'm not in Kansas (or, rather, California) anymore.

*Update 12/2: in a brilliant twist of irony, I managed to spell a number of words incorrectly in this post. Luckily I am not being graded on my spelling, but still, I am dutifully blushing...

On Beer and Human Company: How the Rusty Bicycle is Becoming a Part of the Neighborhood

2009-02-10T19:54:00.006Z

So, finally, here it is, a proper post on the Rusty Bicycle! The landlords were kind enough to have a chat with me this afternoon, so I got to find out more about what's going on, and as far as I can tell, it's good things. See below...in the meantime, I think I'm off for a quick pint down the road, and I suggest you do similar...

On the corner of Hurst Street and Magdalen Road, deep in the heart of East Oxford and nestled between the Cowley and Iffley roads, used to live the pub where cheer and warmth went to die: the Eagle Tavern. Now it’s the home of the Rusty Bicycle, a wood-floored gem run by a pair of young, friendly landlords. My interest in the pub is partly selfish (it’s a matter of yards from my own house), but mostly, if I’m honest, cultural.

Hilaire Belloc, a transplanted Frenchman with an appreciation for all things English, wrote this in 1948: “Change your hearts or you will lose your inns, and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”

Perhaps it takes a foreigner to see the truest importance of pubs; and if that’s the case, I’m certainly qualified. In my California youth, the pub was the pinnacle of exoticism, required a stretch of the imagination just to envisage. It’s one of England’s most famous institutions, built on simple foundations (beer, human company) that have outlasted every recent age, outlived every war and every movement for centuries. And today it runs the risk of becoming sterile. I am not an expert on pubs, but even I can tell that there’s a sadness in the hollow bellies of mass-marketed establishments like O’Neill’s, Wetherspoons, The Slug and Lettuce, places so often replicated, and in so many different locales, that they have ceased to be anything but a holding pen for the tipsy and the more-than-tipsy. The contrast to the Rusty Bicycle, which is still only in its infancy but, as far as I can tell, in good hands, is striking.

Alex Arkell and Chris Manners are fresh out of university. They talked about running their own pub idly, but had other plans until a passing comment from Arkell’s father, the chairman of Swindon-based Arkell’s Brewery, set them on a short path that ended at the Rusty Bicycle.

The turnaround was almost shockingly quick—they’re still breathless talking about it. Manners was heading to Berlin, he says, his travel companion had already bought a ticket, and then, suddenly, he was a pub landlord. The Eagle, true to its reputation, wasn’t in good shape when he and Arkell arrived, but four skips and a lorry full of rubbish later, they had purged the building of mold, carpet, rotting meat, and a weary atmosphere.

The renovation, funded by Arkell’s, resulted in a complete transformation of the pub, which now features warm wood floors, a fireplace, bold wallpaper, and an assortment of furniture handpicked by the young landlords. The result is a pub with personality, enhanced by the photographs and drawings, all done by friends of the landlords.

Still, say Arkell and Manners, the Rusty Bicycle is a work in progress. When I meet with them on a chilly Tuesday afternoon, they are busy hanging a dartboard. They are also looking further ahead, awaiting installation of the internet so that they can offer customers free wifi, as well as a phone line so that they can accept cards (they currently have a cash-only policy). They look forward to opening during the daytime and being able to serve food, as well, and hope to eventually feature live music, open mic evenings, poetry, and quiz nights. They’re still finishing things off, they say, and don’t want to rush anything, but, as Manners points out, “it’s all about not getting stale.”

And so far success, it seems, is on their side: they have sold more alcohol in two weeks of business than the Eagle sold in an entire year. But it’s when they start talking about their clientele, however, that Arkell and Manners begin to reveal what makes them so different—and so refreshing—in a city, a nation, of pubs.

“We don’t want to alienate the local people,” says Manners, and in East Oxford, this can mean catering to a hugely diverse range of people, from students to young couples to established locals who have lived here for years. The landlords say their main goal is to make everyone feel welcome, and that they especially want to draw in people who are looking for a nice pub to settle into for the evening. This, I think, surely this is the point of the pub? And am thrilled to hear them affirm it.

Publicity for the Rusty Bicycle has been almost exclusively word-of-mouth—which in itself has tied the pub even more tightly to the community, who have, upon recommending it, at least some small sense of ownership of it.

This sense of interactivity is crucial, and Arkell and Manners are making the best of it. They tell me that just the other day, they had a customer come in with a photograph of a rusty bicycle, and that they’re going to frame it and put it up; another customer, they say, wants to partner with them to sell his sculptures, made of old bike parts. They may be young, and lacking in traditional experience, but if they do want to be not just a pub but a local pub, they are doing all the right things.

“A good local pub,” writes Paul Kingsnorth in his book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, “serving good local beer, is the ultimate antidote to placeless globalisation. At its best, it can be the perfect representation of a rooted, human scale institution serving good-quality local produce, which results in good-quality local enjoyment.” The world is huge and times, they tell us, are dark; things that are good, and human-scaled, may be just about all we can take these days. And, anyway, as Kingsnorth writes, “It’s hard to know what more to ask for.”

The Rusty Bicycle 28 Magdalen Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX4 1RB
Opening Hours are Monday-Thursday 6 pm-11 pm, Friday and Saturday 6 pm-1 am, Sunday 6 pm-10:30 pm, but check back shortly as the pub plans on opening during the daytime soon!

And Some More Rusty Bicycle:

Where it is...
An article in the Oxford Mail
Arkell's

Another Late Night London Sky

2009-02-10T12:30:00.003Z

Does it always rain in London? Probably not. But there's that cold, seeping into your bones, under the wool of your coat, settling beneath your skin. We stand on the corner under a droopy umbrella, wondering what the point of a droopy umbrella is. Later we sit in the heat of a friend's restaurant, listening to the table beside us. They say things like, I can tell a good wine just by smelling it, and, In Canada we just drink beer, and, But you know what, whenm you go back, you'll be all cultured. They are City people with a capital C, just slightly out of their depth, aiming just slightly too high, so enamored of their own image of themselves that they forget who they are, where they are, why they are.

Time passes more quickly in London than anywhere else I know. First it is just gone nine, and suddenly it is midnight, and then one. We splash down the street with our friend, who we haven't seen for too long (but none of us has the energy to say this), we wait at a bus stop, we go separate ways. Gliding down Oxford Street it occurs to me that there is nothing sadder, nothing that makes me feel smaller and more powerless against the force of the Big City, than glitzy shops all closed up for the night. A kind of desparation creeps into view; the Big City isn't so different after all, is it, I think; it's just as sleepy and just as shut as anywhere else in this in-betweeen hour.

But earlier, on the tube, leaning nonchalantly against the plastic in the car with my headphones and my heavy coat, going to meet The Man, I had remembered how well I like the city-feeling, the knowing feeling; I had felt again the happy chills as I skipped down the escalator and waited for a train, for there is nowhere in the world but a big city that you can feel so a part of the world, such an insider, whilst being above it, too, outside of it.

We wait for the bus home. Now the cold has entered our socks and shoes, our very beings; we huddle close together. For the first time in I don't know how long, we are not unhappy under this late night London sky, just cold, just waiting, just wanting, because it is late, to get back to the warmth of our house.

Er, it's Sunday, and...We're a Little Weird

2009-02-08T19:00:00.005Z

So, it's Sunday, and it's snowing outside again, so this is what we're doing: sitting in the lounge sipping mulled wine, with a fire going, and Christmas songs playing in the background. No, we are not two months behind the rest of the world; just quirky. Here's proof, in conversation-form:

"Like Good King Wenceslas...he went down..."
"He didn't go down..."
"He did, he went down. On Stephen. And gave him a good feast."

Also, the response that George gives his significant other when she murmurs from the couch, "I'm tired": "I know, but this is, this is rock n' roll, this is the chance you take, going out with a rustic poet like me."

Remember: quirky.

Lessons from a Friday Night at Tesco

2009-02-05T16:20:00.000Z

If you absolutely must wear leather-look leggings (and I don't condone this at all, but some of you out there seem to find them irrisistable), for the love of God, wear a thong. Or, since you're pretty much baring it all anyway, don't wear underpants at all. But what you mustn't, mustn't do, is wear panties that dig into the blubber on your bum, because everyone else can see it.
It's unfortunate, but painting your lips a paler colour than the rest of your face doesn't look pretty, or even edgy and cool; it just makes you look like a corpse.
There's only one sort of man who will wear a canary-yellow jumper over a collared shirt (with baggy cords, no less, and patent-leather shoes): the man who wants to be seen as more successful than he actually is. The canary colour is his way of being weekend-y and "playful"--his concession to fun whilst still trying to prove that he's too good at his job to ever really go off-duty. He's probably going to play golf tomorrow. In the same jumper. Avoid him.
If you're the manager of the store, don't hold an impromptu gathering of staff in front of the doors while students are queueing all the way to the back of the store trying to buy as much Jacob's Creek as they can before closing time. It makes it hard to leave. Or enter. And it kind of makes it look like you don't really care about your customers. Just saying.

Rusty Bicycle Update II

2009-02-04T23:31:00.004Z

Another visit to the Rusty Bicycle tonight--a quick stop after a lovely evening. I keep promising to write more on this place and I will, but for now, a summary:

We like. Very much. Warm, cosy, and exactly the pub you want on the end of your street.
Some very trendy people; apparently some sort of message went out to the big-glasses American-apparel wearing Cowley road crowd.
Therefore: good people-watching.
But not sure how we feel about the cowboy-boot-wearing, Guiness-drinking Tibetan with no sense of social convention. I'm not usually very supportive of stifling and oft-arbitrary customs, but there are some that you just need, and this dude, he broke all the rules.
The bike rack out front is getting lots of use. How very cool.

Turquoise

2009-02-03T17:16:00.003Z

I'm wrapped up under the duvet, listening to Chopin. He wants to know if I'm okay.

Me: I'm fine, I'm just feeling...well, not blue, exactly, but...

Him: Turquoise.

Me: Yes.

(He gets me. He really does!)

Anxiety Eats You

2009-02-03T16:31:00.004Z

A while ago, in the throes of some anxious moment or other, I told the Man that I wanted to stop taking my (low-grade) anti-anxiety medication, because (arbitrarily) I'd decided I'd been on it too long. And he asked me something that I had never, not once, asked myself, not in three years. That's great, he said. What have you done to actually reduce the anxiety?

So I pretended to be all offended for a little bit, and then admitted, with some chagrin, that I hadn't done anything. I'd started taking the medicine. It had worked. That was it.

"But I'm happier now than I was then," I said.
"That's not the point," he said.

So today, as I was walking home from work, I tried to pinpoint precisely what anxiety feels like, to me. I had to get beyond the physical manifestations. I think I wanted a metaphor. I figured if I could understand something greater than the fact that worrying over something made me dizzy, my heart race, I could also understand something greater than the relationship between medicine and symptoms.

What I came up with is this: it feels like something is eating you. That is, it's a bit like being in the belly of a beast, your thoughts held captive so that it's the beast's voice, not yours, in your head. That tingling in your toes is the nibbling of the great monster; the dizziness is the Alice-esque fall down the monster's throat and the disorientation after, the doubt, that's the dark cavern of a cruel belly.

Quite what this says about anything, I don't know, except that maybe I shouldn't try to overthink things, but there we are anyway.

Love is a Poor Man's Food*

2009-02-01T23:33:00.000Z

The Man's been telling me about these guys for absolutely ages, but in classic fashion, I've ignored him up until now. I'm sure many of you will recognize this little dance: he finds something absolutely riveting online, and insists that I listen Right This Second while he reads whatever it is aloud, and I go on doing whatever it is I'm doing (trying to decide if my eyebrows are too thick or not, shopping for shoes online, etc). I say, "mm, uh-huh" and offer a few short, diplomatic spurts of laughter where possibly appropriate and then mumble variations on, "hah, wow, that's so cool, who knew?" and he knows full well that I'm not paying attention because I do the same thing to him, and he continues merrily doing whatever the male equivalent of shopping for shoes online is.

But recently, he implored me with more than the usual enthusiasm to sit down and look through these two blogs, and I acquiesced, because I could hear something really, deeply genuine in his voice, and boy am I glad I did. Here's why:

They're really cool! He's English and she's American. They met and fell in love in space of days. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York, where they now live. Yes, I like their story for its parallels to our own, and I like the feeling I got when the Man said to me that it's nice to read about these people with a really amazing history and I got to say back, well, hey, we're not doing so badly either, are we?

But also, maybe more importantly, I like reading the words of two people who are unashamedly in love with each other. It's nice. It makes me feel all hopeful and warm inside. It's like the blogospheric (can I say that?) equivalent of playing with a very small, fluffy puppy, which maybe makes it sound more trite than it is. It's just somewhere between a favorite old book and a small animal, perhaps.

Part of me wants to say to myself: whoa, now, hang on. This is really, super creepy. You're basically peering across an entire ocean into the lives of two complete strangers, watching their every (virtual) move, and making judgments about them, projecting your own hopes and fears onto them. Stop being a stalker and GET A LIFE.

The other part of me says: oh, shut up already. Scruples suck, and bloggers don't write about their lives in the hopes that no one will ever read their words or identify with them as human beings (and if they do, wow did I get this whole blogging thing wrong).

It's the latter part that wins. You know what? It's nice reading something that makes me smile, and makes me feel normal(er), and also reaffirms my belief that human beings are actually really groovy sometimes.

****

It's also made me think, maybe I haven't explained enough about the Man and me. It's always just been that he's a presence in my life (a big one) and, you know, he's English so sometimes we have some really funny interactions. But the thing is that I wake up every morning, and then spend quite a lot of time throughout the day, thinking how lucky I am and how extraordinary it is that I literally found this man that I love at a pub, in Oxford, in a sea of people. I mean, what if it had been a Thursday night instead of a Wednesday night, and he'd been at football instead of the Turf Tavern? I like to think that we'd have met anyway, but life's funny like that--you never know.

It amazes me every day, every moment that I think about it. I don't think about it enough, these days. I used to think about it all the time because it came up all the time, when he was introducing me to his friends or I was telling mine about him. "How did you meet?" they'd want to know, and he used to say, "fortune of chance," and I settled for saying, "at a pub," with the wryest smile you've ever seen. It just seemed too implausible. And implausible, I suppose, it was. I mean (avert your eyes, Mom!), I've kissed other men I've met at bars, too (not a lot, but still), and I didn't fall in love with them.

But I did fall in love with him, and he, extraordinarily enough, fell in love with me. I've forgotten of late not how much we love each other--there's no ignoring that--but about how incredible the circumstances of our loving each other are. We love each other across cultural boundaries and in spite of the distances between our birthplaces. A year ago I wasn't sure how the hell I was going to make a move to England work but now here I am with a boring office job thinking how dull making photocopies is, as if this huge, huge thing hadn't happened in my life to allow me to even have the job in the first place.

It's not that I take things for granted; it's that, in the words of Pico Iyer, who I've been reading a lot of lately, I'm "beginning to domesticate the dream, to know my way around the marvel." Iyer was talking about a place, and I could just as easily say that it's how I feel about Oxford, too, but I think it's just as apt about love. I don't forget that I'm lucky, or that my situation is beautiful; I forget that my coming here to this place (this city, this state of in-love) was so full of chance and happenstance. It just seems so natural. And hearing Ray LaMontagne sing that "love is a poor man's food," when all the newspapers predict a decade of austerity and financial ruin, when my paychecks barely cover the bills and we can't imagine ever having the funds to do something drastic like, hey, buy our own house, only reaffirms how important this is.

*Ray LaMontagne, "Hold You in My Arms"

Notes on My Literary Love Affair with Alain de Botton

2009-02-01T13:31:00.000Z

Here is how I first came to read Alain de Botton:

We were babysitting for some friends who have a small (or not-so-small) library in literally every room of their house, including the bathroom (reason one thousand-and-one why we love them). So there I was looking at the shelf when what should I see but Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. I had never heard of it, but the title appealed to me. I picked it up and started reading (which, if you didn't know, and I didn't for quite some time, is a very dangerous exercise in a house with three small boys who are liable to burst into the room at any time while you've got your trousers around your feet and are deeply engrossed in some work of literature or another). Half an hour later I came downstairs and said to The Man, why have I never read this before, it's amazing? Who only said, I don't know.

I find him fascinating, and inspiring, on a number of levels. He published his first book when he was 23--proof, perhaps, that you can become a serious member of the literary community whilst still in your youth (and even whilst still chronicling it). The Art of Travel, moreover, represents what I consider to be one of the most perfect genres of writing: both artistic and practical, thought-provoking and real, full of precise sentences and invitations to the reader to interact with the words themselves.

And, a few weeks ago, I came across this. It's an interview with de Botton from 2002, just after The Art of Travel was published, and the author's answers to some of the questions filled me with so much excitement that I realized I'd developed a virtual crush on the man, whose work has been described, rather brilliantly, as "essayistic" (I'm starting to use this term to describe my own work, in the hopes that it catches on). The interviewer, Robert Birnbaum, says to de Botton: "I read Kiss & Tell. That was essayistic?" and de Botton responds:

"Well, yes...Really, it was a reflection on different ideas. The point was not the plot so much as the ideas in it...it wasn't totally straight fiction and I suppose I was just trying to move closer to what I felt was where my real interests lay. Which is in a non-fiction structure but which can allow for a certain amount of personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel."

I centered on this because when I stumbled on the interview, I was in the midst of trying to categorize my own book. A non-fiction structure which allows for "personal digressions and descriptions and some of the things that tend to belong in a novel": it's more complicated than "travel" or "memoir", but it's just about a perfect description.

Then I read this, in response to a question about the book's title (emphasis mine):

"It wasn't that I set out with the idea that I'm going to cover the theme of travel. What I wanted to do was to cover certain feelings that we have in certain places, the psychology of places. That could be the subtitle. I was looking around for a form in which to gather together these thoughts and it seemed to me that travel is one of the times that we experience different feelings about different places. So that's really the unity. I would get annoyed—well not annoyed—I'd think that people would miss the point if they said, "But you haven't covered packing." I hadn't covered the impact of modern travel on the environment. I'm not trying to cover all aspects of travel. I'm really looking at particular aspects of it."

Always an elegant and apt wordsmith, de Botton has put his finger on exactly what I want to write about: the psychology of places (or, in the case of the book, of one place in particular). I was practically giggling to myself by now. And the interview goes on, with Birnbaum asking, "What do you think of the assertion that all writing is travel writing?"

"There is a weird way in which modern publishing has put the word travel writing on anything that isn't a story and is really about places," de Botton responds. "The description of place has gone into travel writing. But travel writing goes into so many different strands."

Then Birnbaum asks something which I find unecessary and inane: "I was amused when you related the tiff you and your traveling companion had over two portions of creme de caramel in Barbados," he says. "It seemed strange that two adults would have such a conflict and that you would report it."

And de Botton says back: "I think writing the book I felt an anxiety, "Maybe this is just too weird? Too trivial? Too something or other?...I think I lost confidence in my own experiences and descriptions. I think Jennifer Egan is right that what is wrong with the book is that there isn't enough of me."

And I think he's right--not in there being something wrong with the book but in realising that he, as a person and not an author, would not detract from it; and, indeed, does not detract from it.

Of course, the interview is not all so smooth, or so deliciously focused on the (often misunderstood) literary portrayl of place. There are a lot of digs at Americans that I'd almost forgotten were so fashionable for awhile, especially in the wake of President Bush's reaction to September 11th. You do still get it, of course, but I've lived abroad just long enough to forget this; and obviously we're in the midst of a few glory months for America, when people are blaming those earlier feelings on poor national leadership, and are willing to make Americans seem human again.

Interestingly, though, if you read the interview closely you'll see that a lot of it is the interviewer leading de Botton towards a question of American filthiness, as here, when Birnbaum asks if there are "national characteristics about how people see place and the way they travel from place to place?" which is, I think, an excellent question. De Botton responds:

"I'm sure there are. I think there are a lot of similarities in one what one could generally call the western attitude to places...I'm sure there are some differences. Americans get less time to travel. They travel a lot more in their own country—their country is much more diverse."

To which Birnbaum responds, incongruously, "Americans don't want to meet any foreigners."

But masterfully, de Botton manages to divert the conversation beautifully near the end to explain that place is not as fragile as those afraid of globalisation think it is.

"I think generally the world is too big a place to succumb to this fear of homogeneity," he says, to which Birnbaum asks, "Really?"

"I mean this idea that the whole world is going to become the same," de Botton says. "We have two fears. One fear is that everything is the same and the other is that everything is completely different. In other countries people fry their children and make terrorists all the time: the twin poles. I think neither is true, completely. What's interesting as a European is to discover the regional quality of the United States."

"So we shouldn't fear the advance of McDonald's into Paris and other places?" says (the apprently very wary) Birnbaum.

"No," says de Botton, "these are very, very superficial differences. To take a tragic example, there was a McDonald's in Bosnia, many branches of McDonalds. Everyone was eating hamburgers but then picked up guns and killed each other. It doesn't mean that everyone thinks the same thing."

"So these places are not American outposts. They become localized," says Birnbaum, still unwiling to relent.

"Exactly. When Indian singers do take-offs of Madonna suddenly Madonna songs become Indian songs, in a way. You get these wonderful transmutations. This has always happened through out history," says de Botton.

In terms far less eloquent (and far more outdated): word.

Something to Remember

2009-02-01T10:54:00.003Z

Excerpted from Kate Saunders' review of How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, The Observer, 1 February 2009:

"We will at this point remind you that the purpose of writing is communication...the reader should be able to discover what it is you are saying without having to call and ask you in person."

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

That is all.

"I Sit Naked in an Extremely Cold, Empty Room, Waiting for the Public to Dress Me"

2009-01-31T12:18:00.004Z

"The great man is he who in the midst of the crowds keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last night, on something like a whim, we went with some friends to an opening at Modern Art Oxford. I like art, but I have to be honest: the real art, at events like this, is the crowd (the free wine doesn't hurt either). And Oxford's artsy hordes didn't disappoint. Girls in striped dresses and red heels, or outlandish outfits straight from a very colourful fever dream, men in suits and bad floral ties snapping photos, an appearance by the Lord Mayoress of Oxford (wearing of course the strange medal around her neck which only a society whose lawyers still wear white wigs could condone).

I thought of this rumination on the flâneur, by Baudelaire: "The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite." I thought that the real joy of a museum is not necessarily what it holds but who it draws.

Put another way, in Graeme Gilloch's Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City: “The flâneur is that character who retains his individuality while all around are losing theirs. The flâneur derives pleasure from his location within the crowd, but simultaneously regards the crowd with contempt, as nothing other than a brutal, ignoble mass.”

Eventually, when I was done regarding the crowd with writerly contempt whilst simultaneously basking in the glow of it, I wandered around the actual exhibits: Raphael Zarka's "Encounters" and Regina José Galindo's "The Body of Others". Zarka's highly geometric series of photographs and sculpture (see the photograph above, courtesy of The Man) were easy on the eyes and pleasant to behold (I only mention this because it is, as you shall presently see, so deeply in contrast to Galindo's videos). The photographs, images of huge isolated structures (mainly concrete), were not in themselves extraordinary, though they were nicely rendered; it was the knowledge that these structures, which were man-made but utilitarian in nature, had only become art through Zarka's transposition of them, which made the exhibit thrilling.

But then maybe it's hardly surprising that I liked Zarka: "True to Zarka's interest in the essay form," writes Acting Director of Modern Art Oxford and the exhibition’s curator Suzanne Cotter, "Geometry Improved consists of a literal as well as speculative narrative of formal enquiry...he describes himself as a collector, rather than a maker of objects...the artist sees his work more akin to the cabinet of curiosities, an activity of subjective classification, in which objects are freed from the weight of history and combined in such a way as to suggest new interpretations."

This is only intertextuality redrawn, where intertextuality refers to the relations-between-texts (texts in this case not necessarily referring to words on a page, of course); and a refreshing view on the act of creation. But on a personal level I like it because there's an extent to which it describes the genre of writing that I engage in (and with)--and therefore the genre of my book. Freeing objects (places, texts) from "the weight of history", combining them, suggesting new interpretations. It sounds lofty but just about doable, doesn't it? If you don't believe me, read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel.

The second exhibit I visited was Regina José Galindo's The Body of Others. If I hadn't been on my third glass of free wine, I doubt I would have lingered for more than a few cursory seconds, but my senses had been dulled by Oddbins' Own white and I found myself as if hypnotized, drawn to the horrific images of Galindo, naked, being hosed down, forced to her knees, and Galindo, naked, pregnant, tied to a bed, and Galindo, naked (are you seeing a theme here?), being drawn on by a Venezuelan plastic surgeon, and Galindo (clothed this time!) swinging (as if hung) from a bridge, reading poetry, and Galindo, clothed, carrying a bowl of human blood, leaving red footprints. The worst of all was Galindo, clothed, with her head forced into a barrel of water, like a perverse aping of the torture scene in a spy film. We see enough of this kind of violence already, don't we?

But to give the artist her credit, there was, downstairs, a tiny video installation, a 23 minute long film entitled "Rompiendo el Hielo" (Breaking the Ice), which I found very good indeed. The subheading read: "I sit naked in an extremely cold, empty room, waiting for the public to dress me," and this struck me as almost uncomfortably poetic, as if it was a line from a text, now stripped bare of context and as naked and cold as Galindo herself. The Man and I stood for some time, watching the artist seated on a bench, watching the people watching her. What I liked about the video is twofold. She ends up clothed, first of all, which is (at least in comparison to, for instance, the video of her cowering by a wall with a heavy spray of water pushing her down) almost an admittance of hopefulness (the public will, if you give them long enough, at least metaphorically dress you).

But also (and I can only hope this was deliberate), the idea of the video mirrored the thoughts I'd had earlier about the flâneur; about our place in the crowd, about our being both within and outside of it. "The flâneur derives pleasure from his location within the crowd, but simultaneously regards the crowd with contempt, as nothing other than a brutal, ignoble mass" again. For a moment, anyway (or 23 minutes of cold) Galindo was a true flâneur, and we, by extension, got to taste the flânerie firsthand.

How to Start Your Thursday

2009-01-29T12:16:00.005Z

It's another grey-skied lapsang souchong Thursday.

The Man fixed the electricity problem. I do love men, don't you?

I've got three blog posts to write today. (Yes, I really am sticking to a schedule). I've spent the morning doing anything but work. I'm organizing old photos and music. I plan on making lists at some point, lots and lots of lists, but I haven't even begun thinking about the lists. I'm watching the birds dig around in the wasteland that is our back garden in winter. They're sending dead leaves and wet twigs everywhere.

My books for next term arrived yesterday. I'm quite excited to read W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, but otherwise I'm unimpressed. Beloved I read years and years ago and despised. I hope I was wrong about it, that I was just being a snotty teenager, but as I recall, my general impression was, why does Toni Morrison have to write like this?

I'm digging KCRW this morning. My tea is just the right drinking temperature and I'm bobbing my head around to the Dandy Warhols and Loudon Wainwright, and Michael Franti. Not the most promising way to start a day meant to be rife with accomplishment, but good fun anyway. I'll check back later.

In the Dark

2009-01-26T20:28:00.004Z

My knowledge of electricity is so poor that I can't even tell you what's gone wrong with ours, only that something has. A lightbulb upstairs burned bright for a moment, there was a popping sound, and all the lights went out. We still have electricity--plug-in lights work, computers are charging happily--but our house is dark and here I sit, on the couch, having hunted for the fuse box and failed. It's just too dark to look for a fuse box. Kind of a catch-22, that. Are we horrible people if we leave it till morning? Don't answer that.

What I can't decide is if I should, in present circumstances, escape by having a run. Because here's the problem: it's also dark outside the house. Not much of an escape; but at least I could feel the night city air on my face and pretend I had a glowing house to come home to. Here the light from candles flickers and the orange glow of streetlamps patterns the curtains, forms blocks on the walls. It's a strange in-between feeling. I'm almost too restless to sit still; almost to restless to move.

Rusty Bicycle Update

2009-01-25T13:36:00.003Z

Looks like they share our opinion...can't wait to see what it's like inside. They're open as of tomorrow apparently, and as I also get paid tomorrow, I think we might be able to afford the luxury of a pint or two...

A Short Personal History of Running

2009-01-24T22:25:00.000Z

My parents were never happy unless they had spent part of the day exercising vigorously. We took camping holidays so that they could ride their bikes up mountains. I thought this was normal, so as soon as I was old enough to walk, I started walking with great zeal. There's a story about how when I was five or six I led a hike and actually wore out an adult family friend. Again, I thought this was normal.

How I started running, though, is different. I actually used to loathe it. When I was about 12, the high school track coach recruited a friend and I from middle school, so a few days a week we would train with the cross country team. I know why he chose my friend--long legged, fast--but as for me, shorter, slower, my only guess is that he foresaw a dogged endurance in me that I didn't actually yet possess.

My first year in high school I joined the track team, of course. I used to listen to Belle and Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field" to make myself feel better (or at least a little more indie). It was the most exhausting and miserable thing I had ever done. I'd never been fitter, but I was 14, and this didn't strike me as much of an accomplishment, really. I was more interested in my first boyfriend, and getting good grades so that I could go to a college far, far away, and in reading as much as possible in as short a span of time as I could. There was a glamour about running track, and every once in awhile I thought I could feel the lure of it ("You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body...") but mostly I spent every day dreading the long afternoon hours spent running in circles and through the tiny towns around the school.

I was never made to be a sprinter, and I would never have wanted to (I don't know what pleasure can be got in only a few seconds of exertion) but I equally hated the competition of long runs. As soon as I knew I had to run faster than somebody else, I stopped wanting to run at all. This is, if you couldn't guess, not the best attitude for a competative runner to have. We'll say this: I was never very good at track.

Halfway through the season, my long-legged friend developed knee problems and had to drop out. Then I developed a swollen foot that I milked for as long as I could, and when it had healed, I went and told my coach that I thought it would be best if I left the team. "Is that what you want?" he said (he was slightly scary and I had spent all day in anxious anticipation of this moment). I told him it was. "Okay," he said, and that was it, I was free. I joined the lacrosse team. I wasn't any good at the game itself, but the months of running had done my body good, and I could run far more effortlessly than anyone else on the team. This didn't matter to me, much. I just wished I looked as cute as the other girls in their little shorts at practice.

The first thing I experienced that nebulous thing they called "runner's high" was on the beach at home in my second year of high school. I was running over spring break to stay fit for lacrosse, and I was so surprised, and enthralled, by the feeling that running was good, that I actually threw my watch (which I had to hold in my hand anyway because the strap had broken) into the ocean. This is why I remember the day, and though it seemed like a good idea at the time, I now can't begin to understand what was going through my mind when I did it. In retrospect, it seems symbolic--I didn't want to run because someone else wanted me to, I didn't want to compete with a clock--but we're rarely so self-aware in the moment.

In Boston, running is a serious sport, and I liked going out into the city and feeling a part of something. Even on the muggiest summer day or the iciest in winter you could count on having at least a few other silent, dogged companions.

I've not been the most impressive runner, but I've been doing it fairly consistantly for years now. The only person I've ever found that I can run with is the Man, because I don't feel the pressure to be competative (he's faster than me--a lot faster--and there's absolutely nothing I can do about that), but nowadays I mostly use running as a chance to be introspective and physical at the same time. I like being both a part of the place I'm in and an observer watching it happen. Nobody bothers you if you're going faster than them.

In Oxford, I think I've started to use running as a sort of meditation. One of my regular routes takes me around Christ Church meadow, and though I love the place anyway, it takes on a different tone when you're breathing hard and your legs are moving fast. Suddenly the beauty--which varies in colour by season, but never in quality--is something that invigorates you, moves you, not just something that you move through. I actually run better on days when the light is doing spectacular things to the trees and the spires. Luckily that is most days, here. And on the way home, going down the Iffley Road, I pass the track where Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile and I think that though I will never run a four-minute mile, here I am running anyway.

What to Expect from an English Winter

2009-01-24T13:54:00.004Z

More mince pies than you can shake a stick at. If you liked them before Christmas, you sure as hell won't want to see another one after, and if you didn't like them before Christmas, well...I don't envy you. A bout of "unseasonably cold" weather (you didn't see this coming? after how many centuries? really?). Lots (and lots and lots) of subsequent talk about how cold it is. Very beautiful snowflakes. Weekend girls with bare legs, pretending that it isn't unseasonably cold out. Lots of sniffles and coughs. Frost making art deco patterns on the cars at night. Stoic cyclists. Bare branches. A flurry over hot alcoholic drinks before Christmas (mulled cider, mulled wine...) followed by a general laziness about them after (who can be bothered?). Potatoes for dinner, every night. Root vegetable feasts and homemade soups. Log fires. Coal fires. The smell of log fires and coal fires on the streets. Scarves. Girls in very cool boots. Pubs, but not pub gardens. A brief glorification of the English summer ("oh, I can't wait for June...") followed by a berating of the English summer ("ugh, it'll just rain the whole time anyway). A general sense of polite but vaguely uncomfortable waiting.

The Why

2009-01-22T11:24:00.004Z

I woke up this morning and thought, I'd really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there's nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven't gone for my run.

I'm doing research, and in order to continue this post I'm going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I'm writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I've been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It's certainly not fiction, but it's also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is "the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction," while "narrative nonfiction...is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal." Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I'm to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I've ever been able to pinpoint what I'm writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It's The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee--you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I'm stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to "look at the value your book offers to the reader," and that's something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: "Why do you want to be president?" and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you're going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question "why."

Why? Because I'm too young to write a book; because there's no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we're finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We're becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world--as individuals, as a generation, as the human race--is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are--physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually--the better we're able to understand where we're going. And because there's always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It's finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.

*Obama: "But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old."

Subway Stories

2009-01-21T19:25:00.005Z

On the T, late at night in a crowded car, I used to like to stand at the front, practically brushing up against the driver. It was the only way to lose my sense of claustrophobia, to quiet my distress as the crush of bodies closed around me and the smell of sweat (even in coldest winter), the stifled coughs, crept closer. It only worked on the green line, two linked trolleycars ambling through America's oldest subway system, but from the front car you could see the tracks and feel your own speed, and that was something special.

When I first moved to Boston I rode the subway often, and for no reason at all. I liked how novel it was, how the shape of the city changed beneath ground. I liked being moved by something huger, faster, older than myself; I liked being moved with other people. My knowledge of the city was twinned with my knowledge of its transport. Falling asleep I would name the stops the way they appeared on the map, emanating outward from Park Street--Boylston Arlington Copley Hynes Convention Center, Kenmore.

Once a boy and I took the blue line all the way to the end, to Wonderland. It was Halloween night and I had a paper to write but we walked through the October fringes of the city ignoring the time, ignoring the darkness. I put my feet in the Atlantic ocean, but even so it was an ugly part of the city. The houses looked like they might crumble and fall under a harsh gaze and you could see the pristine skyline faraway, and it looked impossibly distant. There's no way there's a relationship between here and there, I thought, but of course there was, the painted blue trains, they were the relationship.

Another time the same boy and I were on the red line. We'd taken it very far and very late at night and suddenly our car was empty. Have you ever been on a completely empty subway car? It's like the city dissolved. There was only trash on the floor and our jouvenile nervousness. I thought this was romantic, but now it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Already I was isolating us, cutting us off (cutting me off) from everything--the city, the people, and hopes and dreams and happiness.

I used to take the train to Harvard Square for the bookshops. My favourite was a ten minute walk from the station and it was such a cold and empty walk through Cambridge. Sometimes on the way back, if it was late and dark enough, I would steal through the Harvard campus. It seemed a dead campus. You got one or two people cutting through quads and a few lights glowing in stony buildings but compared to the bustle of the city or the intimacy of the train it was nothing, nothing.

When the Red Sox won the world series for the first time in 80 years we took the green line to Kenmore, to Fenway Park. There were people shouting on the train and our entire car broke out into a chorus of, "Yankees suck! Yankees suck!" even though it wasn't the Yankees we'd beat that night.

Once, in my second-t0-last semester, I was on the train going to class when I saw a boy I fancied. I'd never seen him before and I would never see him after but I thought he was good looking and I must have stared all the way from Kenmore to Copley because at Arlington he looked me square in the eye and said his name. We reached across the aisle and shook hands. He told me he was a musician, a guitarist. He was playing a gig that night. I could come if I wanted. I smiled and said maybe I would and got off the train, but of course I didn't, and I was horrified at myself for being so transparent.

It was always too hot in winter and too cold in summer, and in between, you could feel the relief.

That claustrophobia. Once a pair of men fighting jostled their way into my train at Government Center. They were yelling and shouting and the crowd inside tried to make room, and then one of them said, "I'll fucking stab you you asshole" and pulled out a knife and no one screamed but you could hear the breath suddenly hang in everyone's throats, and then someone took charge and dragged them both back onto the platform and the doors shut and people went back to reading the Metro.

The long waits. The later at night the longer, and then, like a beacon of hope, the squeal of rails, the headlights, the rush of wind. The rush of hot wind--I always liked that. It smelled of city. If you were in a great hurry to get somewhere of course you would have to wait. Maybe the T had a sense of humour, I don't know; maybe it was just trying to say look at you, taking yourself so seriously, but does it really matter, is it really going to make you happier, getting to your job or the gym or the bar on time? And the funny thing is, it never really was.

An Illicit Post

2009-01-21T12:31:00.002Z

I had a rejection from The Guardian yesterday. Why advertise my failures? Because (perhaps misguidedly), I genuinely think this is an improvement. It's the first time they've actually responded to one of my queries. So first they ignored me, then they rejected me--surely the fact that they're paying me any attention at all is a good sign. Eventually, if things continue on this trajectory, they'll have to accept something for publication.

Please don't burst my bubble here. I'm being charmingly optimistic--let's leave it at that.

I'm writing this at work (I know, shame on me), and just had one of those incredibly awkward interactions with a pair of students that make me think, wow, I should just quit my job right now. I was utterly, utterly unhelpful to them. At one point, I simply sat staring at them, my mouth hanging open, making confused little "um" noises.

It occurs to me that I get like this when someone asks me, say, where the Philosophy class is meeting today or where students can go if they want to play hockey, because I am in no way an authority on these things. More crucially, I don't actually give a damn about them. This isn't an especially grand statement--I'm not an authority on most things, frankly, and lots of people don't give a damn about their job--but it is an important one. If they were to ask me to discuss last night's speech, or ask for an obsessively anotated bibliography of Oxford literature, I'd be happy--thrilled, in fact--to oblige. But I ought, for today at least, to resign myself to the fact that they're highly unlikely to ask me any of these things, and focus instead on class timetables and hockey pitches.

Morning Post(al)

2009-01-20T08:58:00.004Z

I'm up much earlier than usual today. I've had my breakfast and now I'm sipping tea. I'd like to say I'm enjoying the view (it's a beautiful blue-sky morning and I can even hear a few brave birds chirping) but there's an enormous black and orange truck parked outside the lounge window, so, you know.

These days I'm...

Listening to...Ray LaMontagne.

Watching...30 Rock. Recently we've particularly enjoyed their rendering of Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train to Georgia," and also James Carville's guest appearance (I couldn't find a YouTube clip of that), though as he's aged he has started to look increasingly like a character from Lord of the Rings and it's hard to believe that when I first saw The War Room I actually found him weirdly sexy. That was definitely a triumph of brains over brawn.

Reading...Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. Let me explain: ever since I met him, the Man's been going on about how funny Terry Pratchett is, and reading me excerpts from the only two Pratchett books in the house (I'd like to draw your attention to that number--two--so you don't get the idea that the Man is a Terry Pratchett fanatic of some sort), and I've been duly ignoring his suggestions that I have a go at reading one, paying more attention to my eBay adiction or whatever book I did happen to be reading at the time. The Man likes to read Pratchett before bedtime--make that re-read, for the five-hundredth time, probably--and I've gotten used to seeing his book covers as they slump down onto my pillow and the Man slips into sleep. I even bought him two new Pratchett books this Christmas, partly because I knew he'd enjoy them but also partly because I'd gotten really tired of looking at the same two book covers all the time.

I didn't actually consider reading one until I got sick last week and couldn't be bothered to get out of bed to find a suitable book. So I reached over and grabbed Going Postal, and you know what? It's really, really, quite good. I keep reading the funniest bits out loud to the Man, who tries to hide the look on his face that says, yes, that's great, I've actually read you that passage before and you ignored me. Last night I told him I was thinking of putting this into a blog post and he said, "so it's basically a blog post about me being right?" and I said, "yes, yes it is." So there you go.

Ugly truck update: two men got in and drove it away a few minutes ago. The birds are chirping with increasing authority and bravado, but the blue sky appears to be diminishing. But none of that matters, especially, because by this evening, we're going to have a new POTUS, and man, that makes me happy.

Now I have to get off the couch and go to work.

What We're Like

2009-01-18T18:23:00.005Z

We've become these people that, like, act almost kind of cool, and adult, and stuff. We lounge around with our Macs, in our slightly hip outfits (him: Croc sneakers--though please don't picture these, because his are actually really, surprisingly groovy plus he bought them from a man on the street for the price of two pints--khakis, and a Banana Republic jumper; me: black skinny jeans (yes, I finally caved), slightly ethnic scarf, long cardigan (according to the Observer magazine, cardigans are "in")--actually, the image almost disgusts me. We cook breakfast, have friends over for casual lunches. I sit under a duvet drinking lots of tea and eating clementines (and I'm not the only one) while he catches the second half of the Spurs v Portsmouth game. When he comes home we watch a few episodes of 30 Rock and order a curry.

"You're not eating the nob of your sausage?" he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
"No," I say. "I got bored with it."
He picks it up, eats it. I'm chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
"You're going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage," he says. I swallow.
"Yes," I say. "Yes, I am."

(Maybe not so adult.)

Abandon

2009-01-18T14:36:00.006Z

There's this song by The Be Good Tanyas called "Light Enough to Travel" that I've always liked. It's a good song anyhow but I find these lyrics especially pertinent to today's post:

"Promise me we won't go into the nightclub
I really think that it's obscene
What kind of people go to meet people
Someplace they can't be heard or seen?"

It's how I feel. Not by nature inclined to meet people someplace I can't be heard or seen, I've squandered my prime clubbing years by spending my time perched on park benches reading, and participating in other similarly docile activities, like evenings at the pub or long Sunday lunches. We tend to like to talk to our friends. We're funny like that.

But last night, to celebrate the fact that I was feeling like a human being again, and not a weary monster made of snot and soreness, we went into town to meet up with a good friend who has recently relocated to London (which makes it feel like he's on another planet, because, well, we're basically old people in young people's bodies). He was in town for the night and I thought a glass of red wine would aid the healing process (they say there's good stuff in red wine, you know, and anyway, I couldn't stay in the house any longer), so under cover of January darkness, buffeted by a city wind bordering on a gale, we left the house and headed for one of our regular pubs to share a bottle.

The problem with a Saturday night, however, which we so often forget, is that things get crowded, and there's a sort of madness in the city right now, related I think to it being a New Year, a cold month, the heart of winter. After a charmingly frigid December, after all the Christmas trees have been taken down, Oxford in winter becomes a strange place, fitful, full of waiting. Bled of students, she waits for term-time to begin; bled of warmth, of light, she awaits a new season. You can feel on the wind that there's an edginess, a nervous and mysterious force, but you can't pinpoint where it comes from and you can't escape it just by knowing that it's there.

So the crowd in our pub was not an ordinary Saturday night crowd. It was someone's 26th birthday (I know this because he wore a flashing badge that said so) and he had apparently invited all of his hairdresser friends: girls with black-and-white hair swept into contorted shapes, boys with slicked, spiked 'dos and very tight trousers. The girls were barely dressed--that's another thing about Saturday nights in the dead of winter here. Hotpants, backless dresses, no tights, high, high, high black heels.

Then another friend called and said she was at the nightclub across the street and wouldn't we join her? And we said no, because we're not like that, we object to nightclubs, they're horrid places, they're rank and foul and there's no fun to be had unless you actually want to be dry-humped by a slimy stranger and then possibly go to bed with him (or her) later, which we definitely DON'T.

So it came as quite a surprise to me that, ten minutes later, we were maneuvering our way past about seventeen large bouncers in black jackets and neon armbands, climbing the stairs, ordering a drink. It came as an even greater surprise that we actually enjoyed ourselves.

Don't get me wrong: it was loud, and dark, and I was beyond overdressed, but the music wasn't the ordinary drab string of thump-thump-thumpy songs (they played the Proclaimers, and any establishment in which I can belt out, "and I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more..." without being asked to leave gets at least a small nod of approval), and we had a place to sit, and the best bit of it all was the people.

Next to us, a cowgirl-themed hen party (short denim skirts, plaid shirts, and fuzzy pink cowboy hats) was winding down; the women all looked nonplussed, almost businesslike in their consumption of alcohol, their trips to the toilets, their brief interludes of hip gyration. Most of the girls wore bare shoulders, or bare legs, or both, and heels so high you could practically call them stilts, and still, very few of them looked genuinely sexy. But over the course of a night you're bound to find one or two who exude sex, who actually convince you (if only for an instant) by their walk, the sway of their hips, the way their eyes pass over you, that you'd go to bed with them, if they deemed you worthy.

The manager (a friend of a friend) gave us a bottle of champagne and as I sat sipping I thought I could almost feel, here, the draw of the nightclub. It's about abandon, I thought, abandon, whether reckless or careful, abandon to the dark, to the movements of each limb, to the curve of the long night. It's not about other people at all, in its purest form; it's a kind of implosion. A long time ago someone tried to teach me how to meditate, and I'm not sure he suceeded, but I always remember the things he told me, the things about clearing your mind, about letting thoughts pass through your head, acknowledging them but not opening them--and isn't that, in a sordid sort of way, what all these people, rapt with dance, are doing?

Drowning out thoughts not by silence but by sound--well, I suffer from more anxiety than some, I know that sometimes it's not what you think but what you don't that matters, that sometimes, especially when the madness of winter has crept up on you, it's abandon and not control at all that you need. And it's a cheap way to dull the senses, I know that. They're still slimy, underneath it all--but for a moment I thought I could just about understand places like this.

I Probably Shouldn't Admit This, But I Have Some Shallow Moments Sometimes...

2009-01-17T18:25:00.005Z

What is it about television shows? I'm not an addictive person by nature, but I find it impossible to simply watch TV. For starters, it mostly bores me, and I've never been very good at watching without doing something else at the same time (eating, primarily, but also, at various stages in my life, playing computer games, writing, researching, doing homework, doing sit-ups, you get the point...).

But then, every once in awhile, something jumps out at you. Someone recommends a show and you rent a DVD (this is usually a few years after the show has been popular), or you stumble across something (again, this is usually ages after everyone else has discovered it), and, suddenly, without warning, without being given a fair chance to stock up on canned foods and powdered milk because you're not leaving the house anytime soon, you're hooked, in a seriously unhealthy way. There's something that happens in the brain, and all you can think is: I. Must. Watch. Every. Episode. Of. This. Show. That. I. Can. Get. My. Grubby. Hands. On. NOW.

It's a fickle addiction, though, a fragile relationship, and before you know it you've watched every single episode ever made, and all the outtakes, and all the special deleted scenes, and all the interviews with cast members, and all the tribute videos on YouTube, and there's a brief period--a week, maybe--during which you feel bereft, as if a piece of your soul has gone missing somewhere amongst the empty Chinese takeout boxes in your lounge. And then you're so over it. Like, come on, give me something good to watch.

So you tumble into a new addiction and stay up all night watching your beloved characters negotiate their way through whatever new scenario has been created for them, and when you finally fall into fitful sleep, you dream of them, you become one of them.

I guess you could say that I'm not a casual television-show-watcher. A casual drinker I may be, but I never have just one watch. There's no such thing as just one watch. If I like a show, I have to have it all. I'm not saying it's healthy (and I'm certainly not saying it's as destructive as other addictions, so I guess I should count myself lucky), but that's the way it is.

Over the years, I've had these obsessions often, and over the silliest things, sometimes. It pains me, as someone who considers herself well-read and literary, who doesn't own a television, who believes that you can never have too many University degrees, to admit that at various points in my life I've loved and watched with religious but transient intensity South Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, the X-Files, Law and Order: SVU, NewsRradio, The Office, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and dozens more, some of them even more embarrasing to name (I refer, as I sometimes do, to the quote in my "About Me" section). With the Man and I, it's been House, Gilmore Girls, Spooks, CSI, Mad Men, Teachers, and, most recently, 30 Rock, which we've been watching with great zeal ever since we reluctantly agreed that, since everyone else though it was like, the best thing ever, we should, for the purposes of remaining culturally aware, probably take a look at it. And sure enough, within viewing the first few episodes, a hundred previously-puzzling references suddenly became clear in my mind.

Of course there are always those classics--for me, The West Wing comes to mind--that stay with us longer than a week. But for the rest of it, well--it's all in the name of cultural education, really it is.

(and yes, you get two posts today, because I broke my [already rather tenuous] resolution to write one a day yesterday!)

Of Eagles and Bicycles

2009-01-17T14:40:00.005Z

The pub down the road, the Eagle Tavern,has been a curiosity for some time. It's at the end of our street, a matter of yards from our house, but I can count the number of times I've been inside on one hand.

There has never been anything overtly wrong with it; just another pub in a sea of pubs. The Vicar who lives next door (I don't think he actually is a Vicar, that's just what he's called), in the house called Seaview cottage (we couldn't be any further from the sea), who dresses impeccably, talks impeccably (like an overwrought English gentleman), and is certifiably loony, has been drinking there more or less every night since I moved in. Once a bridal party had their after-wedding drinks there, and a brawl broke out. The police moved in and carted off every single bloody-fisted male in a matter of minutes.

Inside, the Eagle was sad, as if all of the pub-ness had been drawn out with a siphon. No merrymaking here; just hard drinking, lone men drowning in bibulous despair. It had thick patterned carpet and stale air, and you got the feeling you could get lost inside, though it wasn't very large. Once we played pool and once we watched the football but even the drecepit facade seemed to warn us off having fun.

I mention this because the pub has changed ownership. A new sign has gone up; no longer the Eagle Tavern but the Rusty Bicycle. Though we think maybe it would have been cleverer just to hang an actual rusty bicycle outside, we're heartened by this move, and by the fact that, peering inside, it's evident that they've ripped up the carpet and revealed the wood floor. It won't be open for a while yet, but I am harbouring secret hopes that we may end up with a cosy little pub literally on our doorstep.

How to Read Fashion

2009-01-15T22:18:00.011Z

I think I've finally figured it out. High-fashion (as in, runway models, couture, fickle designers) is like really, über-esoteric art (or, indeed, writing)--you know, like those three-minute videos in galleries set on loop, with a close-up of a woman's belly-button and a fly buzzing around it. Bear with me--I think this one is good.

The way I see it, each is as obscure as the other. Pretty to look at, maybe, sometimes, and kind of interesting, if you're stoned, or feel like entering an upside-down world where nothing makes any sense, but otherwise empty.

Enter the fashion magazine: our guide to the fashion world, a dictionary, if you will, an art-history major for the catwalk. Today, you see, I walked to Tesco (the longest walk, in my current state) to buy soup, drugs, and a Vogue.

My Vogue, as it turned out, came with bonus material: The (Topshop-sponsored) Ultimate Catwalk Report. I was so excited! I eat this stuff up! Pages and pages of high-resolution photographs of Popsicle-sticks-with-lips strutting (or whatever it is they do) down the runway in....you name it. Jumpsuits? Check. Toutous? Check. A snakeskin-print bag "that's part luxe backpack, part roomy tote"? Check. Pyjamas? Check! See-through dresses? Check! (Who says men aren't interested in Vogue?) A swimsuit with belt, heels, and leather trenchcoat? Che-eck. (Yep, you heard it here first: Spring is all about pairing your old bikini with a designer coat to give it new life--that's some sharp credit crunch thinking!)

It's like a freakish combination of pornography, people-watching, and well-timed comedy rolled into one glossy, and very colourful, package: amazing.

In the midst of my elation, I started thinking: how do they do it? How do they look at all these clothes (clothes? can you call them that?), at all these images of models dressed up like the emaciated dolls of our nightmares, and determine that there's a pattern for the upcoming fashion season? Like, wow, this poor model was made to wear a plastic yellow bubble over her head (check it--page 34--if you don't believe me), so that means that flamboyant hats are the thing for Spring!

No: honestly, I think they're making it up. I think if you put a group of editors in one room and another group of editors in another, and didn't let them talk to each other, they'd come up with completely different visions for Spring/Summer '09 (as it's called, apparently). I think they see what they want to see in the designer collections, and interpret it for us. To be honest, it's good of them: that stuff needs translation. They give us the trends with such authority, but frankly, I think they're probably sitting in their offices right with a glass of champagne thinking, whew, fooled 'em again!

And then, there are the pet-trends. The ones that they mention every year, the one they throw repeatedly against the wall of consumerism and pray sticks. Like the Midi-length skirt, which crops up every few seasons and looks like a good idea (but then again, what doesn't on a life-size pencil): it's a long skirt, no, it's a short skirt, no, it's--in between! But then you try one on and you realize that unless your legs are six feet long on their own it's never going to look anything but frumpy, and besides, you can't walk properly.

Or the jumpsuit. "Vogue still loves...jumpsuits," says this month's issue. "Get to grips with the all-in-one. It's here to stay." I'm sure it is: in the pages of magazines. Have you actually ever seen an ordinary woman walking down the street on her way to work, or to the pub, or to go shopping, in a jumpsuit?

Neither have I.

So I salute you, high fashion: for your ingenuity, your artistic endeavors, and, mostly, your balls. And I eagerly await the day when someone realizes that anyone can interpret what's happening on the kalediscope we call runway. In the meantime, I'm off to consult the encyclopedia Vogue in the bath.

Dreamworld

2009-01-14T14:11:00.006Z

There's a man outside shouting down the street at another man, "Are we gonna watch a film tonight?"
"Wha'?"
"Are we gonna watch a FILM tonight?!"

Fever dreams these past few nights: deep and vivid. I keep returning to the Bodleian in them. It always looks different, but the grandeur and the books give it away. I get lost, every time, happily lost. Sometimes it takes me awhile to find the entrance. Sometimes I breeze past the porters and they seem to accept me as an insider. In one of these dreams I discover there is a mountain inside, a garden out back. I follow a line of tourists through the snow; we sit and have tea on a patio looking into one of the reading rooms. Mostly, I sit inside and do work. It's very strange to have a dream where you sit and work, and run your hands over books.

Other things in my dreams are less mundane, less easy to pinpoint. Lions and giraffes and monkeys running up a hill. Time-travel: I am disguised as a boy in Oxford, being shown his rooms by a plump woman in an apron. Russian girls wearing wisps of red fabric doing ballet. Me doing ballet; and a handstand, my toes pointed in the air. An upside-down world. More time-travel, as if time is a malleable substance, something made and unmade in my own hands. In the future, my debit card does not work at most cashpoints. Walking a dog. Running up the hill to my parents' house. A dress shop. A series of hairdressers'. A camera, running out of batteries. If only my debit card worked here, I could buy new ones.

An underground palace, populated by animals (lions, giraffes, monkeys), whose doors open only in response to a human touch. Re-sculpting the shape and size of the Earth itself. None of this seems impossible, or even unlikely.

In The Throes Of A Bitter Cold

2009-01-14T12:48:00.010Z

I wish I could write, properly, but I have ANOTHER cold. I think this makes one a month since at least October. The Man suggested that maybe it's because I'm living in a new country. I said, "Pooh. I've been living here for a year." He said, "That's not so long." I guess it's not. After all, he's been living here his whole life.

Other excuses we've come up with: it's winter. I work at a school. An international school, where we don't just get the ordinary floating-around-Oxford bugs, but exciting colds from anywhere from California to Kazakhstan (really).

In my long, slow reading of Javier Marias' All Souls (neither long nor slow by neccesity but by choice, a savouring rather than a devouring), I came across this passage:

"For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time."

I find Marias' book to be one of the most astute that I have found about Oxford. On reflection of course I'm forced to wonder if this is not because it is, by nature, so astute about the city--cities themselves are as subjective and mutable as the books written about them, after all--but because it is so astute about my city. That is, Marias and I are both outsiders here (he Spanish, I American) residing in a place that did not birth us, a place where, significantly, "there's no one here who knew me as a...child." So what he sees in Oxford, and writes up in his work of fiction, and which I years later find to be nougats of genius observation, might well be passed over by someone else--I don't know.

This passage on London, though; on not existing in time: well, how often have I written about the London feeling, the dis-ease, the midnight anxiety and the trembling relief at coming home? I think of the walk from St. Clements to home, always taken in deepest night, in emptiness, as being cold, uncomfortable, but free: when we venture to London we are at the mercy of something else (real time, Marias might say, the world) and when we come back home to Oxford we feel liberated from these bounds.

I'm not saying we take the same view of the city, exactly--his is far more bitter, underscored by repeated assertions of the transience of his time in Oxford, how temporary his existance there. I'm only saying that there's a necessary overlap.

I'm flicking through my music. I can't find anything to fit my mood. I'm not sure there is anything, in all this world, to fit my mood. But the song that's on now, it goes, "Oh September, where did you go?" and I find it possible to feel that now, in midwinter, when September, not so far gone, really, seems a million miles away. There was still foliage on the trees then, and a mild eruption of autumnal colouring in the parks.

It's still beautiful here (I think--I've not been outdoors since Sunday). The reflections in the river are of such disconcerting clarity that the world looks upside-down sometimes. But I'm in such a state of self-pity at the moment that I refuse to notice this.

Some Amusing Sunday Things

2009-01-11T15:01:00.004Z

We got our Official Warning from the TV Licensing division the other day. We've been getting similar warnings for almost a year now, most of which say variations on the theme, "you don't have a TV license, and since we assume you must own a television, that means you're breaking the law, and we're coming to get you." But this one, apparently, is the mother of all warnings, the Real Thing. "This is an official warning that the TV Licensing Enforcement Division will be proceeding with a full investigation of the above address," it starts.

Surely, I think, surely, the government has better things to do. The simple fact is that we have been ignoring these warnings because we are not, in fact, breaking the law. We do not own a television, nor do we "watch or record TV programmes as they are shown on TV" on any kind of device. But we've been amused by the TV Licensing divison's insistance that we're harboring secret television devices. The Man finally called them up to tell them to please stop sending their letters; someone is going to come to our house to make sure we're not lying, apparently. This makes us giggle.

In other news, this, though written back in September, is particularly relevent today. Firstly because it made us laugh, but secondly because I have discovered an alarming derth of socks in my wardrobe. Those that I am still in possession of--mostly holey or unravelling--are never in pairs, EVER. I don't know where they go, but I do know that underneath my boots I'm wearing two completely different kinds of thick wool hiking socks.

And finally, this from Tim Dowling in the Guardian's Saturday magazine: "I file through a mental list of things I have forgotten to worry about." I find Dowling especially likeable, but never more than today, when The Man, discovering this quote, tapped me on the shoulder and simply pointed. Point, as they say, taken.

The Shadow of Things*

2009-01-09T22:40:00.004Z

Instead of going home after work, like I say I will, I park my bicycle on The Plain and cross over Magdalen bridge under a dusting of the tiniest snowflakes I have every seen. I detour through the Botanical Gardens, hushed now, and still, a flowerless expanse full of only of sleeping things, frost-bitten leaves and naked trees.

At Christ Church Meadow the Man calls, and we meet by the walls of Merton college, perambulate around the perimeter of the Christ Church playing fields while schoolboys in red rugby sweaters have a football game on the dark green grass.

Later, when he has gone for a coffee, I make my way around the whole of Christ Church meadow. I see three, maybe four other people on my travels, all of them solitary too, all of them shrouded also in a fog. I put my hood up to stay warm and watch the reflections in the green river, and the ice on a barbed-wire fence, and that soft white dust on the pathway.

The snow is kinder here. In Boston, I remember winters where it seemed fierce as a criminal, and just as evil. Even on a good day, it would coat the streets in heavy layers, become one with the ice and mud; and when it fell, it fell. Here it settles; it's gentle on the wind, unobtrusive, and sometimes you think maybe you're imagining it, that your mind has conjured it out of the cold. It's quiet and pretty; as if, so English has it become, it's afraid to offend.

The city looks more fragile these days. You can see the breath escaping the cold lips of every human here. We live this season in a city made of breath, and of frost, which fades under rare sunlight and cracks in the cold. The cyclists keep their eyes down, their scarves close to their mouths, but in spite of this there is a strange invigoration to be had in coasting down the High with a wind on your tail and your cheeks burning. Maybe it's the only way to feel really alive, when everything else has gone so frozen: to move, to work up a sweat, to remind yourself that in spite of the ice, you haven't frozen. There's warmth somewhere here.

From the upper reading room of the Bodleian yesterday I watched the sun set over the Radcliffe Camera. It was the first time I had ever set foot in the Bodleian. All I did was read and write, but I think it changed me; I think I'm a different person, in relation to Oxford, than I was before I entered. The feeling I got inside is the feeling I think I'm supposed to get in churches, but rarely do: reverence, a resonance deep down in the heart. A sense of surrender and of abandon, but happy abandon.

But still, the last few days have been seen through a haze of alienation. I think it's the fog, and the cold; but I blame the weather when conveniant, I know, and maybe partly it's my own introversion, rearing its ugly head, trying to suck me back into myself, trying to turn my thoughts sour. Bits of things seem wrong, somehow, backwards or upside-down, like maybe the painting I'm in is askew. All the right bits are there, but they're slanted, at wrong angles, and I haven't shifted with them. We have hot chocolate at a café on St. Aldates and I feel that I'm in the wrong part of town, somehow, that I've left a bit of myself somewhere else; we have a drink in the pub, at a table close by the door that we've never sat at before, and I'm restless. There's just a bit of me on edge, all the time. Even when I come back from the first truly satisfying run I've had in months (the kind that makes you literally grin while you're still on the street, the kind that's almost like sex, or drink, in the way it exhilerates you), there's something in the greyness of the day and the midday emptiness of the house that makes my own thoughts seem foreign.

I see people I know everywhere now--in the library, in the street, in the pub--and I think this is good, it means that this place is starting to belong to me in the same way that I, for better or worse, belong to it.

I see people I know everywhere now and, in this cold time, this austere time, I feel we don't quite connect, that we can't until the Spring, the thaw; but we watch each other's breath come in a cloud and are bound anyway by the beauty around us, enfolded in the city and her clever fog.

*Oscar Wilde: “I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one’s life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors.”

In Praise of Holey Jumpers (Or, The Other Holy War*)

2009-01-07T20:56:00.003Z

Oh, apparently, there are rules about what I’m allowed to be wearing in my own house—unwritten, unenforceable rules. So secret I didn’t know about them until I opened up the Times today at work to discover that, despite the Middle East going to hell in a handbasket and the upcoming inauguration of a certain American president-elect, both of which had made it to the front page of the paper, the centerfold featured a dozen full-colour photographs of a pouty blonde wearing various configurations of jumper-tights-wool socks. The headline was something quasi-clever, like, “The (Staying) In Thing” and the first line of the (article? blurb?) read: (and I paraphrase) “Hibernating is understandable. Doing it old holey jumpers is NOT.”

I’m a big fan of the old holey jumper. I have an entire collection of them, mostly inherited from The Man, who rips tears in the armpits of his jumpers at a rate of about two per week, it seems: oversize, thick, unraveling-at-the-hems. Basically old duvets with armholes. And as they are a staple of my household wardrobe, I was shocked to discover that it’s not understandable that I might wear them whilst, say, washing the dishes, or watching a film on the couch, or writing in the study (which tends to be very, very cold).

I’ve come to the conclusion, after a fairly in-depth study of fashion magazines (well, after reading a lot of them in the bath, anyway) that fashion is utterly arbitrary. Forget what Meryl Streep says in The Devil Wears Prada: cerulean blue was only ever in vogue because, well, it just was—and only fell out of vogue because it did. If I had the right job, I could make fashion decisions for the world, too: give me a column in the front of any glossy Saturday magazine and see if I don’t get everyone to start dressing like me.

But despite all that, there’s a certain fashion magazine tone of voice: if you’re a girl, you probably know the one I mean. It’s authoritative. It’s almost propagandistic, it’s so convincing. It doesn’t once occur to you to question the assertion that peep-toe ankle-boots are in (PEEP-toe ankle-BOOTS, the rational side of your mind screams, but you shut it up at the first glimpse of Kate Moss modeling the trend). What do we humble readers know anyway?

So not only was I surprised to find that I was breaking standard lounging-around-the-house fashion etiquette, but I also quickly came to the conclusion that, in fact, I’ve become unduly sloppy in my hibernation-dressing lately, and, really, there isn’t an excuse for wearing hand-me-down-jumpers with gaping holes in exciting places. It’s probably not what Kate Moss would do, and it’s certainly not what the pouty blonde in The Times does.

But here I am at home, and the only thing I want to be wearing is—what else—a holey jumper. Preferably with holey tights (yes, I do own several pairs) and mismatched socks. And that authoritative fashion voice cannot permeate this inclination! She’s not allowed in my house; at least, she’s not allowed near my old jumpers.

But the best response, the most astute, I think, comes from The Man, who, upon hearing the headline, had only one thing to say:

“Oh, fuck off!”

And then he turned on his heel in a jumper which is beginning to show a little wear in the armpits.

*despite my penchant for bad puns, The Man actually came up with this one...

My 2008 in Quick Review

2008-12-31T17:51:00.004Z

We started off the year with Fidel Castro's cigars at the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific, near the Western Gate, windy. I got my university diploma; it was very large. Then it was back to England for an austere few months of late winter cold-ness. I hunted for a job. I got a job. I re-discovered how little I like office work. The Man did research for a BBC 4 radio show, and became a temporary commutor to London. I started cycling everywhere; first shakily, winding my way round the neighborhood for practice. I went to my very first hen-night; I had a fairly significant birthday; my parents came to visit us in Oxford; the Man turned another year older. We tried to handle the cruel transition from winter cold to tempting spring almost-warmth with as much grace as possible, but I still underdressed a lot. In a green silk dress and a kilt, we attended the wedding of two friends deep in love. We celebrated our first year together. I decided once and for all to be a writer, and to go back to school. As summer settled over the city we headed back to California, where we lounged our way through a heat wave, tasted lots of wine, did our best impression of surfers, and got a nice tan. I also applied for a student visa, drove to Burbank and back in one day to ensure that it was received in good time, and, thankfully, was granted one.

Back in England, it was midsummer and beautiful. I hung the washing outside and wore sleeveless dresses, and visited the botanical gardens, and the parks and meadows, often. I went for long walks. I was out of work until September, so I became very, very, very poor. I had to admit that I've been foolish with money in the past, and take out a loan for school. We visited Cambridge, and Brighton, and at the end of August, with the barest hint of autumn in the air, we went to Paris, where we watched people unabashedly for several days straight. I started work again. I started school again. The city revealed itself to be beautiful in autumn, too. The days got colder, and shorter. We looked after a veritable menagerie in the countryside, feeding pigs and staying warm by a log fire. We celebrated the election of Barack Obama and I went to my first bonfire night. Several friends moved away, seeking fortune in London. Time began to seem like a blur, like something running towards Christmas full-pelt.

And I didn't go back to California for Christmas. For the first time ever. We went to carol services and ate mince pies and mulled wine; we bought presents for people and tried to hide what we'd got for each other. We went a few miles out of town for a week, and had Christmas with the Man's family, and unwrapped gifts and ate lots and lots of turkey, and slept in, and stayed warm, and read books, and when we came back, though we'd had a very nice time, we were also happy to be home again.

There are things I've misesd, I'm sure. But for now, we're off to the Isis for a drink and then to dinner with friends to celebrate the new year.

Best to all, and hope you enjoy this last evening in 2008...

My First Christmas Abroad

2008-12-26T14:23:00.005Z

I think I've been dropped into the middle of a circus. We're making turkey pie. Without a bottom, because it's hard to make a pie "without a soggy bottom, and we don't want soggy bottoms."

This is after my very first English Christmas. We went to church in the morning, which is not something I regularly (or, frankly, ever) do (the Man opted to stay at home and help cook the Christmas lunch). The church was a beautiful English village church, wood-beams, stone walls, but inside, it had been carpeted, which made it feel too soft and comfortable; too much like the modern establishments of my own youth.

A pair of boys handed us a bright leaflet with carols to sing. Scattered amongst the traditional songs were photographs of smiling children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Middle East. The children were all called things Mohammad or Mehmet or Moshe and in spite of having families from Islamic or Jewish backgrounds every single one was holding a cross, or decorating a Christmas tree, or pointing at a picture-book bible.

The other leaflet, a green folded paper, let us know when we were meant to say things like, "Glory be to God," and, "Jesus is the truth, allelulia!" Midway through the service a woman stood up to distribute gifts to a few children in the audience, each time asking the child, "and what have you done for me today?" and each time receiving the rueful mumbled response: "Nothing."

And she would say back, "Nothing, exactly. You've done nothing for me, but I'm giving you this gift anyway. So this is a token of my love." Like most good religious messages, it turned out to be a metaphor: God loves us, the woman was saying, even though we've done nothing to deserve it.

"Oh yeah," said the Man when I returned home, feeling I'd been suitably guilted for the day. "That's standard C of E. That's not really considered religious."
"Have we really done nothing to deserve God's love?" I said, forgetting, in my religiously-coloured guilt, that I'm not even sure what I believe about God. "And how on earth is that not religious?"

As it turns out the English have just as curious a relationship with religion as the Americans. As far as I can tell, the Church of England is not so much a Church-with-a-capital-c as an establishment with some tenuous and primarily historical links to some tenuous and primarily historical religious beliefs. But it's pervasive. If you go to a church wedding in England every single member of the audience will know not only the words to all the hymns but, more impressively, will know when to stretch certain words that don't look like they should be stretched, or when to take a very long pause that isn't written into the music, or when to forgo breath because everything needs to be squeezed into one beat. They all know this because regardless of whether their education was public or private, they grew up singing these songs in school.

You couldn't, on the other hand, logically sing a song with the words,

Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray

in any American public school and not risk an uprising of mothers quoting the constitution. We have that famous so-called separation between church and state, you see; but actually, the English are the ones with the real separation. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (or any other carol) isn't seen, as the Man so aptly pointed out, as religious--just as traditional. If half the audience on Christmas morning had stood up and pronounced themselves Jews, or Athiests, I don't think anyone would have blinked--or thought it odd that they were sitting in on a Christian ceremony.

Our relationship with religion in the states, however, is just as bizarre. We claim to have severed the tie between religion and governance, but elect our leaders based on their religious ideals and affiliations (any political pundit will tell you that if you want to be president, you need to seem to have a good Christian family, regardless of how religious you are). We inspire an actual fear in our children that saying the words "Christ our saviour" means that we believe in something that might be objectionable to someone else, but one of our nation's most impressive artistic legacies, gospel singing, is a form of worship. What we forget, I suppose, is that we founded our country based on having the freedom to worship any way we wish, not on creating a secular society.

***

But regardless of the religiosity, or secularism, of English society, this was Christmas as I have never seen it before. For the first time ever, I set out snacks for Santa before going to bed (a glass of port, a glass of milk, two mince pies, two carrots--"why the milk?" I wanted to know; "in case Santa wants a choice," the Man informed me). The next day at breakfast we opened our stockings; after church we spent hours (no, I am not exaggerating) opening gifts, adhering to strict rituals of present-distribution. We commented on missing the Queen's speech. We took a very lenghty nap after a very heavy lunch. We played cards and sipped gin and tonics. We ate crackers and fruit and cheese for supper. We went for a starlit walk, our noses numb from cold.

Today I sit on the sofa in the lounge, South Pacific on the TV in the background. I hear a woman singing: "And they say I'm naive to believe anything from a person in pants..."

And because we are adults, but still not very adult, the Man and I giggle.

So yes, I missed my family this Christmas, and even the incongruous California warmth (when I was a child it angered me that Christmas came every year so hot and sunny); but here we are, and we're very, very happy, and we're together, which, as I told the Man when he suggested that Christmas was ruined because he had a cold (only a man would say that) is the most important thing of all.

"Here," the Man has just said to me. "Taste the beer-and-cheese sauce I've just made," and waved a spoon at me. I think it's time for me to rejoin the circus.

Look What I Did!

2008-12-18T16:19:00.002Z

For those of you interested in reading me warbling on about living in the UK, check out my expat interview...

The City at Christmas

2008-12-17T15:10:00.004Z

Back to work today. I can't say I feel quite human yet, but I'm getting there.

The city feels empty. It's a gloriously sunny day, warm for December, the sort of day you'd like to enjoy by talking a long walk alongside the river and then warming up with a pint inside some cozy pub. But there's no one here. On the roads, there are few cars and fewer cyclists; in town, the pedestrians seem sparse, and walk not in groups but alone (hurriedly) or in pairs. The Christmas cheer that came over town a few weeks ago, the lighting of trees, the late-night shopping, the wood-smoke smell, all of that is paling, waning.

Everywhere I ever go I have the sense that at Christmas, things start to implode: slowly the cities lose their people, as if no one lives here, as if this isn't home, as if we all have to run somewhere else because we live here for 99% of the year and Christmas just isn't Christmas if there isn't movement involved, somehow. But the truth is that we do live here, this is home, there's no need to leave.

Still, I like the emptiness now, the still, the quiet. It lets you see the city, and enjoy it, even. There are patterns to Oxford's population, I suppose because in essence it's a university town, at the whim of its flitting students. I've never before been here in December but I'll tell you this: it's a different place altogether.

The Man is making me a belated lunch in response, I suppose, to my pathetic sniffling. So the house smells warm, and good, and we'll make our Christmas cheer together. It's only a bit past three but already that refreshing sunlight is waning into dusk, and schoolchildren are trudging down the street, and evening rituals are being put into play. We let late come early, in this season.

More Winter Madness

2008-12-16T23:06:00.004Z

Still suffering from A Cold. Here's what I have done today:

Slept well past noon;
Cycled into town to deliver clean trousers to The Man, who got his muddy this morning whilst chasing a dog (who was chasing a chicken) through a country garden;
Cycled home and collapsed on the sofa feeling sorry for myself;
Heated up some canned soup for lunch;
Watched many episodes of this seasons' Spooks even though I've already seen them because a) I can't be bothered to find something new on television that actually interests me and because b) as the Guardian's "Chart of Lust" rightly pointed out recently, women everywhere are developing an obsession with Richard Armitage, and his nose, and the absurdly cool spy he plays. I've got a cold and midwinter angst; I'm allowed a small celebrity crush. Deal with it.
Realized that the show called MI5 that I used to watch back in the days when my parents had a TV and I was trying to avoid my AP calculus homework is, in fact, simply Spooks re-named for an American audience;
Had a long bath whilst listening to Classic FM's Smooth Classics at 6; "your relaxation station." Considered being embarrassed by this; thought better of it;
Made something that resembled dinner out of pasta, half an onion, a huge clove of garlic, a carrot, and some cheese. Neglected to clear anything up after;
Wondered if all this time alone in the house is making me a little crazy;
Listened to the same Goo Goo Dolls song about twelve times in a row whilst perusing www.dooce.com
Decided that I am definitely going a little crazy.

Note the absence of having got any work done. Or, for that matter, any Christmas shopping. I keep thinking that I'll start feeling really Christmas-y soon and start looking forward to my favourite holiday with fresh zeal, but for some reason every time I think about it all that happens is that I get unnaturally exited for the fact that I'll have a whole week off work. I want to be able to sleep in with my love and wake up and have bacon and eggs, and mungle around the house with neither of us having to go to work, or get work done; it's the prospect of that which excites me.

The Tyranny of Winter

2008-12-15T13:15:00.004Z

I have another cold; it's bleak midwinter outside, all grey and frost and bare, spindly-limbed trees. It's Christmas, almost, but it doesn't feel it: I have the sense of running at full speed towards something that I can't see, that's just, perhaps, over-that-hill-there. We were meant to babysit tonight but because I'm feeling so rotten I'm staying home to soak in the bath and drink cup after cup of tea; somehow the prospect of spending the evening without The Man seems dark to me, even though I know I have a lot of work I need to get down to doing, anyway; even though I'm not great company at the moment anyway. I think this is what they call man-flu, maybe--but I'm not officially admitting to it, just throwing it out into the ether as a suggestion.

But in my avoidance of work, which today so far has taken the form of perusing The Guardian's Books section (a far more highbrow form of avoidance than usual, to be honest), I came across this, which amuses me to consider. But my problem is not so much all the books I've bought but refuse, for some reason or other, to read, but all the books I've bought and would really really like to read but haven't yet because other books keep getting in the way.

Take George Steiner's My Unwritten Books: I've been on page three for nearly six months now, because I keep reading other things. Or Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, The File on H by Ismail Kadare, all of which are lingering near my pile of "books I'm currently reading," as if they, too, want to be included; all of which I've dipped tentatively into at some point and then withdrawn so that, in their stead, I've finished Orlando, The Night Climbers, various novels by Colin Dexter, and an über-academic text on Walter Benjamin's writings on The City (as a literary idea, so therefore, in my mind, it deserves unecessary capitals).

Then again, maybe I'm just in denial. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me that actually, I don't really want to read these books, in spite of the fact that I think I do. Or maybe I should just buckle down, concentrate on one thing for longer than fifteen minutes without finding something else more interesting, and actually read them.

But somehow, I think none of this is going to stop me from buying oodles of books this holiday season.

Oh! You Pretty Things...

2008-12-02T23:04:00.006Z

It was a dizzy trip to London (as they all are, maybe); a disjointed evening, so that by the time we were in bed I felt like there had been several days between leaving and returning.

First we are late; then a few drinks at someone else's expense. We move on to a party at the top of Centrepoint, only we are too late for the party and all that is left is the slop from spilled cocktails and a gathering of ultrahip young things, dancing as only the ultrahip can: without passion, without grace, without movement, almost. They are so cool, these young things, that I think they could kill us with their cool, if only they weren't too cool to be bothered. They are so cool that they actually make me feel old, and frumpy. They are so cool, and so hip, that they do not even see us. We move through them and they part in beat to the techno music. There is so much cool in the air we can scarcely breath; we do not linger for a drink. We stand at the edge and look out over London.

The one good thing about this party is the view: and the city lit up, so that the stars in the sky seem to be below us, not above. Later we think maybe this view makes the entire misguided trip worth it. From up here it looks like the city runs all the way to the horizon and beyond. London loses its London-ness; it is a City, a gem of human endeavor. We are the only still things here.

Then we are walking on the street again. Towards a dingy underground private member's club. It's like descending into a speakeasy. On the stairs we are harassed by staff until it becomes clear that we are, in some way, affiliated with a member; then they are lovely and let us pass. Behind me, a lone drunk, tie askew, whispers, "Dunno what all the fuss is about. It's just a bloody pub down there." As we pass into the bar, he begs to be let in.

The light inside is green. There is something of the tikki-bar about the place, and film posters on the wall, and lots of young actor-types. We are no longer in the realm of the ultrahip but now in the realm of the ultracamp. In the back, behind thick tapestry curtains, several anterooms stand like invitations to the illicit. The figures on the wall are often pornographic, but ironically so: large phallic flowers erect in a garden, silhouettes of busty Victorian ladies.

Back on the street. The half-light of late London. We buy chips and a pita wrap from a kebab shop and get on the wrong bus, from which we embark at the wrong stop. We stand in the rain in a posh (and therefore empty) square waiting for another bus; it is nearly December now, and cold, and we huddle together and collectively wish that we had not left the sanctuary of our own small city, where just a few hours ago (or was it days?) we were having a drink with a friend at an uncrowded pub, were just a few minutes walk from our house, our warm, quiet house.

We get off at the right stop. We still have miles to walk, it feels. We skirt Victoria station, trying to find our way. I bump shoulders accidentally with a woman walking very quickly; she turns back, snaps something at me. I snap something back. I do not often feel aggressive, particularly for such a transient reason, but suddenly I think I might feel violent if i don't move on quickly.

We sleep on the way home. It is nearly five by the time we alight at St. Clements. As always, a hush over the streets; the drunks at home or asleep by now, the workers still yawning their way awake on the fringes of the city. As always, I need a pee, and we are just far enough from home, and it is just bitterly cold enough, that the walk seems impossible. But of course it isn't; that's just the night speaking, still.

At home we strip and climb under the duvet. I had been bitter about London before, at the bus stop; I had said, "Who was it who said that you could never be bored in London, or else you were bored with life? He was absolutely right; you can't be bored in London. You also can't be fucking happy." Now I start to soften, as if the warmth from the house has smoothed my edges. I murmur that it wouldn't be so bad if only we had somewhere to stay the night; or that it's only the cold, and the rain. I say that maybe next time we'll do it better; and weren't all those hip young people funny? And he says how beautiful the city looked from that one clear point, how absolutely beautiful.

Notes

2008-11-16T19:34:00.008Z

Notes from the Botanic Gardens, November 9 2008

This is the one place in Oxford where I always feel that I am on the inside, looking out.

The river is green, the trees are yellow.

What is it about a garden? All around me are signs of Autumnal decay--a wet and barren landscape, the scratching of leaves against a cold ground. And yet I think that, in the presence of things which have grown, will grow, we can suddenly believe that we, too, grow.----There in the murky pool we see peace, or hope, or both; our thoughts become un-crowded, we start to believe in the permanence of the trees and the transience of all else. We have a clouded sense of happiness--not perfect, or impure, but unusually tangible.

(I go for a run today. The sky is heavy, the grass has turned a deeper shade of emerald, and the yellow leaves have all fallen from the tree outside the study window. Every season is the most beautiful season, here.)

Bonfires & Remembrance

2008-11-08T18:44:00.006Z

My first bonfire night on Wednesday. We walked down the river to the Isis. There was no Guy but there was a bonfire made of old boats, and mulled cider with bits of apple in it, and sparklers, and homemade lentil and chestnut soup served in paper cups. There were fireworks splattering the sky, and the Man and I agreed that our favorite part of the fire was not the flames but the sparks that were drawn up, like red stars fading fast. We wrote our names in the air with the sparklers and when the bonfire had died down and all the men were trying to revive it, I went to the edge of the river. The night was wet and windless, and the water itself stood black and still, so that the reflection of the trees looked almost more real--starker certainly--than the trees themselves. Jerome's three men (and a dog) may not have paddled down the river in November, but for a moment I could feel them sleeping on the shore here. Then we all went inside again, to warm our hands and lean against the bar.

The fireworks have been going ever since. On my walk home tonight I see them blazing above my street; sitting here in the house, I hear them going off with imperfect but inevitable regularity.

We still battle this cold; blowing our noses, overcome with lethargy and a need for fruit. This morning I woke up and suddenly wanted to make myself toast with honey and bananas, which was something I ate a lot in my first year of university; first I stilled myself because I am not like I was then, but then I thought: we do not have to erase every memory just because it is not the way we are now, and I cut up the banana into slices and placed them on my toast. But we had no honey after all.

***

In the waiting room at the doctor's the other night, a white-haired woman with a cane broke the English code of silence amongst strangers despite the open book on my knees. First she said she wasn't here for herself.

"I'm here for a friend," she said. "She's got dementia. She can't take care of herself. I've known her oh--eighty, seventy--sixty years, if not seventy. We were very close. It's horrible to see her like this. I still care for her but her family won't take any responsibility. It's all up to me. I am feeling resentful today. Today is my day, for me. I'm having to miss my afternoon rest which I'm all but ordered to take. I could have sat at home and read a book."

She looked at me. "I suppose you're too young to have to deal with this. You're of--another generation."

I said I was, yes, but that still, I knew people who were struggling with the same thing. She nodded.
"It's everywhere, isn't it."
"Horrible," I agreed. Then she asked what I was doing here.
"Studying?"
"I'm doing a masters," I told her. "At Oxford Brookes."
"I've got two grandsons here at Oxford, and another at Oxford Brookes. And my daughters went here, and I was at Oxford as well, you know. And my mother was here! She was here before the War, the First War. She left in 1912 and do you know when she was given a degree?"
I smiled; I did know the answer to this one. "Not for quite some time after, I would imagine," I said.
"Not until 1928," she said. "Can you believe that?"

Then she was silent for awhile, and I tried to read about the origins of human creativity but my head felt full and my nose dripped. I coughed into the turtleneck of my jumper.

"My uncle was in the first war," she said abruptly. "He lied about his age to join up, in 1917? Or 1918. But he died. It always seemed to me that they didn't know what they were fighting for, then. In the other war at least they had Hitler to rally against, but that first war, it had no--direction."
"Yes," I said.
"It's been coming up a lot recently," she said, touching the red poppy pinned to her breast. "All that generation is gone."
"Yes," I agreed.
"And my husband--before we were married. He was in the second war. He joined the Air Force and was there in the Battle of Britain. And it's strange--I remember that summer. I was at Oxford, you know. And we were throwing our mattresses out of the windows so we could sleep outside, it was that hot--and the men were coming across from Dunkirk. The College authorities must have been worried about us, you know, but they let us do it, they let us put our mattresses outside because they knew what we were going through."

Then the doctor called her in.

And I thought: to a shell-shocked soldier the blasts of fireworks or the cracking of the bonfire might mean something very different than it means to the rest of us.

Discipline and Punish, Or, Foot Massages for All!

2008-11-04T00:24:00.003Z

I think this is brilliant. But I have two questions:

What happens if a child has extremely ticklish feet?
Could this new method of discipline actually lead to an ironic rise in bad behavior? (Cheaper than the local day spa, anyway)

Whatever Happened to that Other Crisis?

2008-11-03T12:48:00.008Z

I'm amused (and maybe even a little incensed) by the recent spate of columns, features, and everything in between about how to deal in the current economic crisis. Timely they may be, and maybe even necessary; but they are also, in large part, overwrought and insincere.

Overwrought: "If, for the fashion-forward, instead of Prada and Primark it's now all about feel-good car-boot sales, charity shops, free-cycling and frock exchanges, for the rest of us it is an hour in Tesco fossicking for the two-for-ones and the nearly-past-their-sell-by reductions, putting £20 worth of petrol in the car instead of filling the tank...growing herbs on the windowsill, making lots of shepherd's pies...and saying 'no!' (possibly for the very first time) to the kids when they demand stuff at the checkout...so not only is it exactly how it bloody well ought to be but it is all the better for being without smug self-righteousness or a gleeful need to be somehow au courant with 'recession chic'."

This is Observer columnist Kathryn Flett's version of a now very familiar tune: the "oh-my-gosh-they-tell-me-the-economy-is-failing-so-now-I'm-going-to-panic-and-buy-less-stuff" song. But Flett's own amazement should have tipped her off to something: "as I ambled from Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus and down Regent Street," she writes, "I was faintly astonished, given that the financial blight formerly known as The Crunch is now officially The Recession, to find that instead of tumbleweed and stumblebums the Street was heaving with shoppers, laden with bags, wearing the glazed expression of hardened consumers in search of their fix."

Insincere: What exactly is there to be astonished about, I wonder? In the Sunday Times Style magazine, editors suggest a "skinted" (i.e. "affordable" version) of a £7,000+ designer cocktail dress which costs a mere £50 from a popular high street shop. This is an increasingly common phenomenon--"credit crunch friendly" shopping advice--but let me ask you this: is £50 really affordable, if all is going to shit like they say it is? Do we really have any right to express shock at our fellow consumers, who flit in and out of the Oxford Street shops as readily as they did "before" (as if there was a before; as if poverty was not always a vague and distant threat, as if the mentality that Flett describes is not merely the same state of mind that the young and strugglign are in always)? I don't think we do; even if Vogue is handing out suggestions on how to live an affordably fashionable life, instead of merely a fashionable one, it's still Vogue, and we're still human.

We're seduced, you see--as Flett alludes to--by the idea of recession (wartime chic, growing our own onions, snuggled in a sparsely furnished lounge with nothing but our own fires to keep us warm in the darkening winter). The Sunday Times Style magazine, this sunday, features "The Joy of Thrift: India Knight's Brilliant New Book on the Glory of Make Do and Mend" on its cover, with an impossibly beautiful blonde in a 1950s-era outfit, pretending to knit; but is this actually what we want to do? Of course it isn't, as Colin McDowell rather ironically points out in the same magazine: "Clearly the way forward now is austerity," writes McDowell. "Thrift shops and dress agencies immediately come to mind, but it is wise to remember this: one of fashion's golden rules states that all the most God-awful garments in the world are destined eventually to sink to the thrift-shop clothes rail, which is fashion's equivalent of Skid Row. Avoid. Just as definitely, do not go into that murky world called home dressmaking or--even darker-alterations. And under no circumstances start to knit."

We could translate McDowell's paragraph thus: "Clearly the way forward now is austerity--pretend austerity. Thrift shops may come to mind, but it is wise to remember this: there is no real need to be actually austere, so for God's sake stay as far away from the charity shop, the sewing machine, and the knitting needles as possible. A failure to do so will mark you out as unfashionable and, even more horrifically, genuinely strapped for cash; so do your bit and head on down to the affordable high street shops."

With this in mind, Kathryn Flett's concluding paragraph seems suddenly thin. What exactly is wrong, we wonder, with "feel-good boot sales" and charity shops? Why shouldn't we feel good--and how is this worse than frequenting the ethically dubious Tesco and putting--you poor thing--just £20 of petrol in the car? Surely recycling items is not only "recession chic" but actually necessary. In her own panic, Flett seems to have forgotten that we have another crisis on as well; and a less glamerous one at that, for there is no chic precedent for an environmental emergency.

I'm tempted to say we should combine our crises: if we're so concerned about pinching pennies, why not put our money where it really matters and nowhere else? Why not visit Oxfam occasionally, instead of Topshop or New Look? The beauty of fashion, I've always thought, is that it is what we make it, and nothing else--if "recession chic" is in, then let's use it. Why not grow herbs on the windowsill--and potatoes in the garden, and onions and lettuce, and then invite our friends over to sip wine and warm the house? Why feel that we can't spend an extra few pounds on local, fresh foodstuffs, that we have suddenly to be slaves to Tesco and Asda just because the politicans tell us that money is in short supply and Wall Street has fallen?

Don't get me wrong: I'm as shopping--happy as the next Young Thing, and yes, I like my clothes. A few months ago I made a silent challenge to myself: to buy no clothing except underwear and stockings new; and it's working remarkably well. I probably won't cease consuming altogether--I'm too young, perhaps, too insecure--but I'll happily forgo an extra pint at the pub or this seasons' It-Outfit if it actually means something. We simply can't afford empty gestures anymore.

Things at the Moment

2008-11-02T17:05:00.004Z

I have a lot to write about, but no impetus to do it. I'm suffering from a miserable cold and though they've finished work on the house little things still seem to be out of place: my bicycle is naked without its basket, the mirrors are still not up, we have more laundry than seems humanly possible for two people to have. We spent a few days out in the country, both of us coughing and groaning, feeding pigs and then sitting close to the fire catching up on our television-watching (as we don't have one, every time we're in a place with a TV, we become a bit scary). I appear to be useless at the moment; all I can manage is to suck on Strepsils, feel sorry for myself, flip through the Observer, watch snippets of Lord of the Rings (why that, I couldn't tell you).

It's been rainy and cold lately, but in general, the city has taken on a hue of almost heartbreaking beauty: late autumn, and though dark falls early, to catch the sunlight glinting off the windows is a reaffirming experience.

I'm formulating new ideas on literature and politics (more to come), aided by a quick and almost careless line in Joyce's The Dead: "He wanted to say that literature was above politics" as well as by various more overt articles. I'm rearranging books and looking forward to making the house nice again. I'm listening to music and buying all my winter clothing secondhand. Next week is election day; so I remember four years ago, being in Boston and walking in a chill November fog to Copley Square where thousands were rallying for John Kerry. I remember going to sleep with the nation still undecided and waking up to dissapointment, and having to change my outfit because I was irrationally afraid that people would think I supported George Bush because I was wearing cowboy boots. Our own minds are very strange sometimes.

Also, my first Guy Fawkes night coming up. It's going to be a very political week.

Things I Have Tried Unsuccesfully to Do This Evening

2008-10-24T22:59:00.004+01:00

Spend more than a half hour at any time away from my new favorite couch in the lounge
Clear out the kitchen for the painters tomorrow
Read Jane Austen
Read anything
Write
Go for a run
Go for a walk
Do the dishes
Fold the laundry
Look at my to-do list
Take a long, lazy bath
Go round to the shop to buy a bottle of wine

Things I have successfully done:

Listened to the same music over and over again
Nearly cried over an episode of Gossip Girl
Thought about how lazy I'm being
Eaten dinner
Answered the door once (next-door-neighbors letting us know about a party tomorrow)
Fallen asleep on the couch at an awkward angle, leaving my neck sore
Wondered whether or not I'm suffering from a temporary sort of ennui, or at least having a minor existential crisis, as everything just seems to difficult to bother with...
Wondered whether or not I can be bothered to go upstairs and get into bed or not

...and when I say "tried to do" I mostly mean "thought about doing".

Oh boy, it's half term...

October

2008-10-23T22:03:00.004+01:00

There is a rhythm. On Thursdays I am always slightly late chugging up Divinity Road, and then, seven hours later, I come back down. Tonight there is a mist, and a bracing wind that makes me think of being on a ship. I buy soup and a toothbrush at the shop on my way home.

Our house is being painted, so all the mirrors have been taken down. I live an existence without reflection; I don't know what I look like when I leave. In a way it's liberating: I take less care getting dressed, am quicker, more decisive. There's a strangeness in the house: the table from the bathroom in our bedroom, the bookshelf from the hall in the spare room. I have to climb over a trunk to get to my clothing. In class I ask if I smell of paint, because I imagine I can still smell it. There's a ladder on the stairs. There's no point in cleaning up the clutter in the study because everything is uprooted anyway. We float around; we sleep in; we take a nap on the couch side-by-side even though the couch is, technically, too small for such a maneuver. I would say it was a sense of upside-down-ness, but it isn't an unpleasant sense, if that's what it is.

I watch the laundry dry in the lounge. In our Lewis Carroll universe, all of this matters; but outside things go on as usual. Friends are coming to stay; we are going to the country for half-term; our vegetable box continues to come every Tuesday. In the mornings when I cycle to work I am often doused with a showering of leaves; they coat the pavement wetly. I read that in my hometown the temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit; here there is a chill in the air and it is almost not October anymore--you can actually feel this, even if you didn't know the day.

2008-10-17T14:05:00.000+01:00

Here is what I know (or what I have learned?): writing requires immense courage.

And A Piece of Advice...

2008-10-05T12:23:00.003+01:00

The Man has just given me a piece of advice that I feel worthy of sharing.

"Don't try to scratch your nose with a cupcake," he's advised me. "I just got cake in my nostrils."

I'm going to join my cake-snorting love in the lounge, and resist the urge to scratch body-parts with baked-goods. I suggest you do similar.

Strapped for Cash

2008-10-05T11:53:00.002+01:00

If I wasn't already consumed every moment by anxiety, I would be by now. Even The Guardian had a "Crisis Special!" in its Money section. When The Man's parents dropped by yesterday evening for tea, pizza, and some draught excluding, his mother casually wondered if the credit crunch was going to impact people's essential curiosity (actually she'd wondered if it was going to impact the success of TV show/business QI, but as I'd just suggested that the reason such an enterprise works is because of people's endless craving for knowledge, it was as good as).

If I played a drinking game--one sip for every time the word "crisis" comes up--I'd be pissed before breakfast. If I got a penny for every time, I'd be rich--but that wouldn't be very credit-crunch-likely, would it.

So, all this in mind, alongside my constant awareness that I am a relatively new adult and, as such, perpetually poor, I volunteered to invigilate the SAT examination yesterday at St. Clare's. As one of my co-workers put it: "It's mind-numbingly boring, but by midday, you'll have made £50." Every word of that is true.

What my co-worker couldn't have predicted, however, were the flashbacks. I took the SATs, you see, not so very long ago (although long enough ago for me to have forgotten how many HOURS the process takes), and trapped in a room with fifty-odd teenagers and their No. 2 pencils, it's impossible not to remember the Dunn School edition of the same exams.

Then, I remember envying the proctors. At least they're not taking this god-awful test, I thought. Yesterday I would gladly have taken the test. At least they've got something to do, I thought enviously of the students. I kept having what I believed to be brilliant wisps of thought, one-after-the-other, but as I had no way to write these thoughts down, they've all gone. I'm a writer, not a thinker, you see. To fill the expanses of time, I started coming up with names for the students. I played with my bracelets, my ring, my earrings, and it occured to me that possibly jewlery was actually invented not to adorn women but to give them something to amuse themselves with. I lamented the fact that my new wool tights are a full size too big, and therefore slightly saggy at the knees. I stared deep into the eyes of the two enormous drawings of handsome, well-cheekboned youths, and tried to decipher if the one on the right was a boy or a girl (the lips were all woman, but the nose unmistakably masculine). I got very, very hungry.

When I was taking the same exams at 16, I was as these students yesterday were: nervous and well-behaved. The SATS are designed, I'm convinced, to make pupils so anxious about whether or not they're filling in the tiny answer bubbles correctly or have written their name down correctly that they forget anything they've ever known about reading, writing, and mathematics. "Nervous and well-behaved," I said to my father when he asked me how the students had been ("Did you catch any cheaters?" he wanted to know, but the closest I'd come was having to tell an especially anxious-looking girl that she couldn't have her ruler on the desk. "Why not?" she rightly asked, and for some reason, although it would have been completely out of character, I desperately wanted to tell her: "Them's the rules, sweetheart. Them's the rules." Instead, I shrugged and apologized six thousand times.) "Gee, who does that sound like?" he said back.

Nervous and well-behaved. Yep, that was me at 16. For the entire third year of high school, I moved around with tiptoes and whispers. Constantly afraid. I don't remember taking the SATs; but I remember dreading them. I remember finishing them and thinking, well, thank God that's done, now I can actually get on with my life. I had stopped caring about my scores long ago--all that mattered was that I put the experience behind me.

Yesterday, I walked out of the testing room enveloped in an early-afternoon gust of wind, cycled into town, and flopped down exhausted next to The Man while we waited for lunch.
"I feel like I've just taken a test," I told him. By evening I was so weary that I didn't know what to do with myself. To counter my oncoming headache, I went for a run, but it started to rain middway through and by the time I'd gotten home again I was drenched, so I took a bath and finished a particularly mindless book, and ate cold pizza whilst browsing through vintage clothing online. I tried to have a glass of wine, but after a few sips I was too sleepy to go on, and crawled upstairs to wait for The Man to come home from work. Cash crisis. Energy crisis.

Demand Nothing but the Best

2008-10-01T19:31:00.004+01:00

I found this article, (it's a bit of an oldie) on Sadie Jones, author of the bestseller The Outcast, rather interesting:

"She is every publisher's dream – good-looking, husky-toned and, what's more, she can actually write. Her debut bridges the tricky gap between literary and commercial writing: shortlisted for the Orange Prize, picked as a Richard & Judy Summer Read (which sent it to number one in the book charts), and there was even talk - which eventually came to nothing - of a Booker Prize longlisting. "The Richard & Judy/Booker Venn diagram crossover – no, I don't think they've ever done that," she says wryly today."

As you may have guessed, I'm not an enormous fan of the divide (no, make that abyss) between what's perceived to be "academic" type literature (i.e. cryptic at best) and what's perceived to be "trash" (i.e. anything found on your way out of Tesco). So I like that Ms. Jones, as a successful writer, is willing to make a wry comment or two about the perceived disparity between Booker-worthy literature and Richard & Judy-selected books.

What worries me, though, is The Outcast itself, which I read some months ago (one of the perks of being attached to someone in the book industry is the acquisition of proofs) without judgment. I knew nothing about Jones, and I knew nothing about how the public would react to her book. All I knew was that I read the book fast, and obsessively, and that I didn't like the writing very much, but I thought she could tell a damn compelling story. It's not that the writing was poor; it was perfectly adequete, even lovely at times. But it lacked the sparkle of well-used language, and I fret that, though we're making steps towards the "The Richard & Judy/Booker Venn diagram crossover" what's got lost in the meantime is appreciation of craft, and that what we forget to value is an exceptional ability with words, because, unlike an exceptional ability with characters, such an ability cannot stand alone.

***

On a more political note, we can hardly find this surprising, though it's refreshing to see it in print:

"In 17 countries, the most common view was that US relations with the rest of the world would improve under Mr Obama."

Things That Have Recently Made Me Smile

2008-10-01T12:29:00.005+01:00

Late night city walks

The slightly smokey smell of September

Finally being warm because it's Autumn and I don't have to pretend anymore that the weather is summery and wear skirts and sandals

My new rust-coloured coat

Watching bad television online whilst in the bath (glass of wine optional but always appreciated)

Using the fireplace again

Woolen jumpers

My bicycle--avec recently pumped tires

Walking through Radcliffe Square in the evenings and getting to think, I live here!

Lazy, lounge-y Sundays with good friends and good food

Knowing my neighbors (even just a little) and passing gardening equipment over the fence

Wearing The Man's scarf to work

The way my coat flutters when I'm cycling

Chocolate in the afternoon

Being snuggled up when it's cold outside

addendum

2008-09-27T12:48:00.002+01:00

If I sound overly melodramatic about the state-of-the-political-world it's only because I am. This distance, put between me and the circus quite consciously, is making me crazy. I went to a Democrats Abroad meeting in the pub a few weeks ago and felt bolstered; I listened to a young student from San Diego deliberate with herself and felt like the world was coming to an end.

All in all, I think I'll feel better when it's over and we have a new leader.

In the meantime I've started school again. I'm sinking rapidly into the feeling that what I want to do more than anything else is wrap myself up in words and swim in the sea of Academia and sunbathe in the fruits of my research. (Mixed metaphors, anyone?) So I'm formulating a vague plan.

On a happy note, the Man has returned from his sausage-making expedition smelling of pork and bearing 22 lovely-looking sausages. Moreover, he assures me, we have some more in storage, waiting in a friends' freezer. It's a good world, all in all.

The 2008 Presidential Election as Greek Tragedy

2008-09-27T12:04:00.003+01:00

This being the first and only write-up on last night's presidential debate that I've read so far, I'm coming from a distinctly uninformed standpoint here. But never mind that. There are only three points which I wish to call attention to, and I don't think any of them requires a higher degree of credibility than I have:

1) I can pretty much guarantee that Senator McCain's almost-decision to "suspend campaigning" in light of the current financial crisis was a purely political move, likely cooked up by advisers to make the Senator appear sympathetic to the crisis and more concerned with his country's plights than his own campaign. But it's a catch-22: if he had suspended his campaign, he would STILL be campaigning. The very act of suspension would have been an act of campaigning. Once you enter the presidential race, you don't leave until someone's been declared victor. EVERYTHING that you do is part of the act.

2) From the Post article:

"Later, McCain's voice dripped with derision as he questioned Obama's statement that he would meet with the leaders of rogue foreign countries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"So let me get this right: We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, 'We're going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,' and we say, 'No, you're not'?" the senator from Arizona said."

Oh, I know what'll help the USA interact with the world at large: cutting ourselves off from it! No, Mr. McCain. I think it takes a lot of guts for Obama to say something like that on national television (in this era of frighteningly instinctive, "gut-based" electoral politics, Obama now runs the risk of being unhelpfully associated with the Iranian President). I also think that he's absolutely on the right track. Forging relationships--however tremulous--is something we clearly haven't tried to do as a country for the last eight years; and I fail to see how a simple willingness to meet with other leaders--however terrible they might be--can be detrimental to us now.

But I think it all stems from a fundamental difference in worldview that was highlighted later on in the debate...

3) Also from the Post: "The two candidates had an emotional exchange over the bracelets they each wear in memory of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, underscoring the deep divide created by the war." I think staff writers Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray are wrong here: this is not a divide created by the war. This is a divide that always was. See here:

McCain wears the bracelet of a 22 year old soldier killed outside of Baghdad. McCain recounts the plea of the soldier's mother: "But Senator McCain, I want you to do everything -- promise me one thing, that you'll do everything in your power to make sure that my son's death was not in vain."

Obama wears the bracelet of another young soldier. He says of this soldier's mother: "She asked me, 'Can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I'm going through?'"

I couldn't help, in my circuitious mind, to think of Euripedes' play The Trojan Women, which might be the most powerful anti-war narrative ever told. It's not about the soldiering, or even the war itself; it's about how it effects the women left behind, and it's painful. McCain wears a bracelet that symbolises finding meaning in war--a defeatist attitude, as if the act of war is inevitable and all we can do is not seek to prevent it, but merely make sure that it is "not in vain". Obama wears a bracelet that symbolises the possibility that future generations of mothers and sons, of human beings, will not have to suffer the rigors of battle and its gutting aftermath.

"I have left the gates of darkness where the dead are hidden and Hades dwells apart from the gods, and come to this place," says Polydorus, son of Hecuba and Priam, appearing as a ghost, opening Euripedes' play. The candidates are in the "this place" of the play; a place not where the dead are hidden but where the living roam, where "future" and "possibility" exist, where the human mind may still be swayed, or opened. Let us hope that we move towards light, and not closer to the gates of darkness.

Found in Moleskine

2008-09-23T16:24:00.006+01:00

"If this is love...there is something highly ridiculous about it."
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

After the crowded late-Summer bustle of Brighton, Oxford seemed full only of ghosts if it was full of anything: the streets wide and empty, the people, when they came, very quiet. Gone were the calls of the Hare Krishna as they marched, the yelps of excited babes and the storms of hip young traffic. All old; all calm.

As I sat waiting for the clouds to part overhead (they showed some inclination to do so just over Blackwell's), it seemed to me that all of Oxford was bathed in the most precious of blue-grey light, which made the walls shimmer and the air, though quite cool, as in a dream.

At last I began to feel cold, sitting there on the steps, and glancing idly to my left saw that tiny pub, The White Horse, and thought, just as idly, that I could go and sit in the warmth and have a half-pint of cider and be quite content for a time, especially with a book; and so struck was I with the idea that I leapt up almost at once and began to make towards the place, whose windows glowed appealingly yellow. I was tired of sitting on the hard stone, of watching everyone on their way, of being unmoving; tired of waiting for a friend or acquaintance to pass, and quickly, happily, found myself inside where all smelled of wood and ale. It was warm, too, and this warmth meant a great deal to me, for all the air of summer seemed to have been bled from the day, leaving only a soft Autumnal chill and a grey haze over the city. I asked for a half of cider.

"Just a half?" said the barman, but without any humour. I might easily have been cajoled into a pint by a cheerier 'tender, but so dry seemed this one that I simply said:
"Yes, just a half," and took it and sipped, and sat down upon a high bench near the window.

Clown and Pelican, Entertaining Crowd

2008-09-18T22:28:00.006+01:00

A few weeks ago, I experienced my very first St. Giles' Fair. Surely this must be some kind of secret Oxford induction: in the dead-quiet of early September, when the leaves are on the cusp of changing and a hush has come over even the busiest streets, suddenly the flame of festivity erupts on one of the city's most charming tree-and-college-lined roads. In my research, I read that, "since the nineteenth century, St. Giles' Fair has been held on the Monday and Tuesday following the first Sunday after St Giles' Day (1 September)"—a fittingly circuitous formula for a circus-esque display.

Here's what John Betjeman wrote about it in 1937 (in An Oxford University Chest):

"It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles' and even Magdalen Street by Elliston and Cavell's right up to and beyond the War Memorial, at the meeting of the Woodstock and Banbury roads, is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves. Every sort of fairman finds it worth his while to come to St Giles'. Old roundabouts worked by hand that revolve slow enough to suit the very young or the very old, ageing palmists and sinister, alluring houris excite the wonder and the passions of red-faced ploughmen…. Beyond St Giles' the University is silent and dark. Even the lights of the multiple stores in the Cornmarket seem feeble…. And in the alleys between the booths you can hear people talking with an Oxfordshire accent, a change from the Oxford one."

It isn't so very different today, fundamentally: "Beyond St. Giles' the University is silent and dark...".

Historical photos of the fair show ladies under wide parasols, in sweeping black skirts and busty white blouses. The men wear caps at jaunty angles and plus-fours, or suits and bowlers. There are striped tents and little girls with ribbons in their hair. The great stone walls of the University are all but hidden. Elaborate, fairy-tale structures have been erected where once was only an empty avenue.

The caption of one photo, taken in 1895, reads: "A large crowd gathered in St Giles during the annual fair to watch the Fair Days Menagerie. A clown and a pelican are entertaining the crowd waiting to enter."

When I attend the fair, the outfits are t-shirts, scarves, and denim, and nobody carries a parasol, though they wouldn't need to anyway: it's a day as grey as they come. A mist settles on my bicycle as I wheel it through the crowd. There is none of the frivolous accordion music you expect at a fair, only the heavy thump of electronic beats and rock bands (the Man, who works in an office on St. Giles itself, came home that evening looking frazzled and as if he never wanted to go near the place again). The only people on the whirling carousels are white-haired women being photographed by their white-haired husbands, reliving the glory of their childhood one musical spin at a time. Today's young prefer the faster-paced rides: the roller-coaster outside the doors of a college, the things that spin and shake you into a state of blissful oblivion.

I am reviled by the prospect of such things, though a lifelong attraction to bumper cars is rekindled as soon as I see the shiny floor of the Dodgeum ring. Enormous stuffed animals, arcade games, and the universal sweet smell of the fair (cotton candy mixed revoltingly with fried foods) accost the senses at every turn. I have the sense that I have stepped off my cycle and into a Fellini film. I don't know quite where to look: at the Haunted House? The giddy teenagers in their tiny straight-leg jeans and pixie haircuts, cigarettes protruding from underage lips? The enormous pink polar bears on display, the food stalls, the patient tweed-clad fathers trying to keep up with their eager, bounding toddlers? I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to see a clown and a pelican holding court. Part of me is disgusted, but another part of me can't help cracking an enormous grin.

**

When I get home I check the news, as if there might be something new, but there isn't. There's doom and gloom and the circus of the presidential election--McCain/Palin (a clown and a pelican?) making gaffes wherever they go, Obama making speeches, pundits and political analysts making predictions, everyone else making noise. The whole world appears to have been swallowed by the same Fellini film that took over St. Giles for two days in September.

that good-old-back-to-school-busy-season

2008-09-18T21:41:00.004+01:00

I went to buy a new bath mat today, but they didn't have any under £12.99 that weren't all kinds of ugly, and I decided I'd rather not spend that much money on something I'm going to use to dry my feet off with after a lengthy soak. Too lazy to try anywhere else, instead I went down Broad Street and bought myself a few books--which came to a grand total of £13. But in retrospect, I'll take books over bath mats any day.

We have other people's mail coming through our letter box. Some of it I don't know how to send on, so it just piles up on the second desk in the study. We don't own either of the desks, but there they are, lit up by lamps that aren't ours either. I think if you stripped the both of us down to our own true possessions we would have nothing but books and clothes, in that order. I can't decide if that makes us free or just pathetic. But when you have somebody else's furniture crowding up the house you've come to think of as yours, even when it isn't, you start to feel tied down by things.

When I paid the tuition for my MA the other day, I swear my card looked weary when it came out of the machine. It looked up at me balefully as if to say: don't ever make me do this again. I spent a full quarter of an hour marvelling at the fact that I had never ever spent that much money in one easy go before. And I wonder, in a way I've never really wondered before, how all those people with their fancy strings of degree initials actually manage to pay for that much education.

But I'm distracted by the necessity of buying new books, and pens, and stationary. Eighteen years in you would think this might get tiring but there is something eternally satisfying about the back-to-school season, and I don't think that I could ever feel disappointed by the return to education.

It's funny to think of the formative memories I have from my early schooling. Mixing raisins with my apple juice, with disastrous consequences (I was put off raisins for years). Being in the bathroom at preschool and wondering what it would be like to pee standing up, like the boys did. Mouthing the words to a song and having the teacher call me aside after. Her gentle, crushing admonition. Saying my favorite color was white, and not pink, just to be different from all the other little girls. Running across the tarmac at snack-time, falling, scraping my knee, crying, being helped by a boy whose name I have no recollection of. Making stories with felt cutouts. The teacher who limped and carried a cane and frightened me so much that I dreaded the days when my mother would tell me she couldn't pick me up until after storytime. Children calling "na, na, na na na!" at each other on the playground for no good reason. Putting on a play I wrote in the second grade and later in the year coming home to my mother after discovering that King Arthur, our newest focus of study (we'd just finished a lesson on giants), hadn't been a actual king and asking when we were going to learn about real things.

***

It almost almost smells like autumn outside. And it's getting to be chilly. I wore a wool coat to a dinner the other night, and I wasn't sorry. Inside we wrap ourselves in duvets (I'm wrapped in one now). We refuse to put the central heating on until October of course.

Mostly I am in the back-to-school daze, and everything I think to write has left my head by the time I make my busy way back home. The house has become a refuge. Which is funny really. A few weeks ago there was the house down the road which burst into flame; and the fight at the pub at the other end of the street which warrented what seemed to be an entire fleet of police vans. This weekend we were startled into wakefulness by a pair of voices--male, female--arguing in that way that only couples do, and just when we thought maybe they had had their last go we saw the ambulance coming down the road and the man got in with a book tucked under his arm. In the morning we saw the blood pooled outside the house directly next door, where the head wound he had inflicted on himself by hitting the door had spilt onto the concrete. And after all that was over there was an incessent rapping across the street, all morning long, it felt.

Sure, we stick our heads out of the door. We can see other heads poking out, too. But I feel like this is part of living here, and the truth is that I still think we have the most beautiful house in the neighborhood, just like I think I have the handsomest bicycle in Oxford; and we cosy up to the rush of September leaves together: he now only semi-bearded, me wearing thick jumpers. It's winter in California, here: green, rain, cold sunshine, gentle light.

Sunday News Roundup (A Trifle Late)...

2008-09-08T15:38:00.002+01:00

Just one on the agenda today, because, let's face it, apart from all the doom-and-gloom predictions about how shit the economy is, and how much shitter it's going to get, there's really been only one constant this week, and her name is Sarah Palin.

I have but three things to say about Ms. Palin (the very sight of whose name makes me feel anxious in a way I haven't since High School, when I was consumed with worry every day).

1. SHE IS A CREATIONIST. Who just recently acquired a passport. No, ladies and gentleman, this is not the latest Miss America, this is the potential President of the United States.
2. When, how, how and HOW did various (fairly respectable) media outlets decide that she not only isn't that bad, she's...er...an invigorating choice for VP? Am I living in an episode of the Twilight Zone?
3. Did I mention she's a CREATIONIST? Who just recently acquired a passport? 'Cos, see, we have this thing called the separation of church and state, and I'd quite like to see that upheld. Moreover, we have this thing called FOREIGN POLICY. Foreign. Policy.

If Ms. Palin is allowed anywhere near the White House—anywhere near—then I shall suggest a mass exodus from the USA.

In other news, the St. Giles fair is on in Oxford. I'm now of the opinion that you can't fully comprehend the word "surreal" until you've seen a roller-coaster shooting by the austere walls of an Oxford college, a Merry-Go-Round beside the Martyr's Memorial.

Crossing

2008-09-01T11:43:00.004+01:00

In the old days, people would ask you how your crossing was--was it a rough crossing, or a smooth one? they would want to know. That was when the only way to get to Paris was over the thin, choppy stretch of sea called the English Channel, and it was much more of a production.

Now there is no crossing: only a long, swift, sweeping motion, like a wave of the arm--you fall asleep in Paris and wake in London, and there is just a tunnel, a fast train between two cosmopolitan cities. At the station everything is in French and English and all the announcements are made in both languages. Even at this early hour people are reading newspapers and preparing for their day in suits or swish trousers and high heels. It is impossible to tell why they are making the journey. I myself am making it to get my visa stamped.

"Is this your first presentation?" the man at passport control asks me about the visa, and I nod.

We stayed first in a cheap hotel and then at a friend's crumbling, recently sold apartment. On our last evening there we were having a meal on the mattress--cheese, paté, wine--when a girl came into the apartment to take away all of the furniture. It was embarrassing because our friend had forgotten to tell us she would be coming and had forgotten to tell her that we would be there. We slept without a mattress that night (last night), in the August heat, but it was okay somehow.

We walked around a fair bit, but because he had sprained his ankle the night before we left we had to take it easy. I read The Flaneur by Edmund White; it reminded me that Ernest Hemingway was hungry and poor in Paris, too. There is a passage in A Moveable Feast that I had forgotten until I read The Flaneur; it's long (less a passage and more a chapter) but the start of it goes: "You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food". Then he describes how he used to wind his way around the city avoiding all the places that made him hungry and tempted to spend money. But also he writes: "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." So there's that, and it's a far nicer thing than being able to afford a fancy hotel with a mattress or to enter every museum or shop for souvenirs and clothing that will just take up space anyway.

We drank café au lait facing the street so we could watch all the people. Our biggest expense was coffee, not accommodation or food. It was a good thing he had bought me The Flaneur, really; "the flaneur," White writes, "is...in search of a private moment, not a lesson." And, "Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone."

We had a kir each at Sartre's café, Café Flore, across from the Lipp where Hemingway eats in A Moveable Feast. Because the drinks were so expensive we drew them out, sipping slowly and delicately, enjoying being able to rest our feet while other people walked on by. The waiter brought us a plate of green olives and I sucked them from a toothpick and we picked the pits out from our teeth.

There is probably a lot more I could write but I'm tired. We've been on the road for most of August, it seems. We've been to Cambridge, the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Paris. Oxford has emptied completely, taking a tiny breath before she fills with students for the term. Even the Cowley road this morning as we walked back from St. Clements seemed wide and quiet; only a few cars trickling past, hardly any other pedestrians. I'm uploading photos and going to have a nap. It's September, and part of me doesn't know how this came to be, even though I've seen it happen so many times before.

My Age of Anxiety

2008-08-18T12:09:00.010+01:00

I was flipping through the Observer magazine yesterday when I came across this article, by Harriet Green, which begins with black, bold lettering: “Welcome to the era of anxiety”. It goes on: “Generalised anxiety disorder is the world’s biggest mental health problem. But do we really have anything to worry about?”

On the facing page, the author holds up a sign that indicates she is worried about the credit crunch, global warming, drinking too much, her sex life, the price of her house, and, of course, being worried.

I waved the magazine excitedly at The Man (who has, if you’ll notice, graduated from being The Boy as his beard has reached an epic stage and he could no more be mistaken for a boy as I could).

“Look!” I cried, pointing. “Who does this remind you of?”

We had a good giggle.

But, as Green points out, “I accept many of my concerns seem unserious. And in public I make light of them, happily casting myself as a kind of female Woody Allen. But when I’m at home those ridiculous concerns can take over.”

Mine took over in spring of 9th grade, when I suddenly and seemingly spontaneously lost the ability to sleep peacefully, something that up until that point I had had no trouble doing at all. My body shook, my head spun, and I lived in a sort of bubble of terror.

To confound matters, I had just acquired my first boyfriend (which is not a term, at the age of 14, that necessarily means the same as it does later, and in this case it meant someone to make out with in the library stacks and hold hands with between classes, more a social rite of passage than a romantic affiliation) and I remember thinking, as I lay awake at night wondering if I was ill or just an insomniac: I have to get to sleep. I can’t be sick. If I don’t get to go to school tomorrow, I don’t get to see him.

To be in darkness was unbearable; I left the light on all night (almost a sin in our solar-powered house) and sometimes, when I thought I could hear the silence crawling into my ears and playing in my head, I put a CD into the boombox and listened to celtic guitar, or medieval chanting, at a volume just quiet enough to not float through the floor and into my parent’s bedroom. I was just old enough to recognize the shame in waking them for such a trivial matter, but just young enough, too, to wish that I could.

This was when I discovered that nights are twice as long as days, and a thousand times as lonely. By dawn I would drift into a state of half-sleep, and the singing of the alarm clock an hour later sounded like relief to my soul.

To comfort me, my father told me that when he was little and trying to get to sleep, he used to get the feeling that the corners of the room where forever receding; but by nighttime I felt alone again. I didn’t try to make a connection with my mother’s famous highway panic-attack, which crippled her driving confidence for years (only recently has she begun making the trek down to Orange County again on her own), or the stresses (mostly social) of my first year in high school.

Instead, I sought rescue in routine, and a host of obsessive-compulsive activities. I started sucking on “Moonlight Mints,” homeopathic, supposedly-sleep-inducing sweets my mother had picked up in an airport at some point, each evening, trying to convince myself that they were in some small way making me weary.

If the sleeplessness passed, the worry certainly never did. Five fretful years later, I found myself in a doctor’s office. I had passed from innocently anxious to severely obsessive-compulsive and back again. On the eve before I started a new job, I awoke with a jolt to all my old symptoms: the walls of my room seemed to be receding before my very eyes, I couldn’t be sure if I was nauseous or not, my heart beat fast. I went upstairs (I was staying the summer in my parents’ house) to the living room and flopped down on the couch. I fell asleep re-reading the same dull passage in Cosmopolitan about how to make your guy lust for you even more, but all summer long I battled with sleeplessness and shakiness, until one panicky evening, my father suggested that I might be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

“What?” I said.
“You know, panic attacks, that sort of thing,” he said. “Look it up.”
I went online. I couldn’t believe this had never occurred to me before. Every single one of my symptoms was named as an indication of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I felt instantly, physically better just knowing this.

I told the doctor that it wasn’t the worry, so much, but the physical symptoms, that I needed help with. I wanted some kind of reassurance that this was normal:

“I’m just amazed at how physical the manifestations are,” I told him. He was a physician’s assistant I had never seen before, our family doctor being on holiday, and he looked at me kindly.
“There’s no need to be embarrassed about it,” he said. “It happens to a lot of people.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to decide if this made me feel better or worse. I wanted to tell him about the way the room spun, the way my stomach churned and my heart raced how I shivered even in the heat of a California summer, but part of me worried (yes, worried) that he would tell me how unnatural this was. It had certainly not occurred to me, however, to be embarrassed about it.
“Sure,” he went on soothingly. “It even happened to me, when I was going through a really stressful time. You are talking about loose stool, aren’t you?”
I wanted to laugh with relief.
“No,” I said.
"Ah," he murmured. And I fancy that, despite his advice to me, he was slightly embarrassed now.

He gave me some pills, which I took home and promptly stashed away. I was genuinely afraid to take them. I read the possible side effects (always a mistake). I flipped through my copy of Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies so often that the pages started to look tired, trying to convince myself that what the doctor had prescribed me would help. Finally, egged on my parents, who I think were growing weary of having a 19-year-old worry-wort wandering the corridors at night, I swallowed the first pill. I awoke in a panic several hours later.

“Um, I think I’m having a bad reaction to the pills,” I told my parents, holding out my hand to show that it was trembling.
“I think,” my father suggested delicately (bless him), “that you might just be worrying about them.”

A few weeks later I wondered why I had made such a big deal of it.

But Harriet Green adds another perspective to her article, which I take to heart because, well, it’s really aimed at people my age: “we are entering a new age of anxiety. As the economic situation worsens, so fretting in the general population rises. In the past year, oil prices have risen by 50%, basic foods such as rice have soared by as much as 70% and house prices are plummeting at a faster rate than we’ve seen in a long time. Those in the know are starting to whisper that we’re heading for the mother of all recessions.” Or, as Merryn Somerset Webb, editor of MoneyWeek, so comfortingly puts it: “People are anxious, and they are right to be…People under 40 are not used to losing jobs or being made redundant.”

In other words: this is a hell of a time to be a newly-indoctrinated adult. Adulthood, I’ve recently learned, is hard enough (who knew that paying your own rent could be so painful?—let alone paying for, say, a second degree from, say, a foreign university?). But being told that in the current climate, we’re right to be anxious adds another layer to it entirely. A new age of anxiety? But I thought I’d already had my age(s) of anxiety.

So I’m starting to think that what remains to be done is follow the advice of Tom Hodgkinson (editor of The Idler, who, if you’ll remember, was partly responsible for the pig-roast in a London traffic island): “Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food—the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away,” Hodgkinson is quoted as saying in Green’s article; he “encourages us to take matters into our own hands and simply shed the burden.”

Yesterday, we went and pulled up all our potatoes and had a gorgeous Sunday roast, complete with chilled rosé and a peach-and-shortbread pudding. Of all the places I’ve lived (and, granted, there haven’t been so very many), England has perfected the art of the Sunday: shops close early still, and the most famous tradition (apart from churchgoing, which frankly I can take or leave) is centered around eating, and, in our young lives, good friends. I know I’ll always have a battle with anxiety—and maybe it’ll be a bigger battle because of the environmental and economic climate, I don’t know. But I do know it’ll be an easier battle with things like long, lazy sunday lunches to look forward to.

"Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy."
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing